This is the King Richard III reviled in conventional accounts of English history as ‘the author of the most revolting crime in history’ – the murder of two young Princes, his nephews, in the Tower of London. Even the Inspector Grant books vary widely – in The Daughter of Time, for instance, he sets out to unravel the difference between the appearance and the reputation of Richard the Hunchback. Others have amateurs or professional lady detectives.

Some feature the fastidious Inspector Alan Grant, who appears in A Shilling for Candles – her first murder mystery I read. But choosing my favourite Josephine Tey to gift – or to review – is not an easy task.Įach Tey is so very good and so very different from the others. For the past year or so, the new editions of the Tey mysteries are available in India as well, which means we have been able to gift them to friends and introduce them to this rare author.

It just explains how I got to the other Teys thanks to Snehanshu (who combines the soul of a researcher with the qualities of a collector and has the tenacity of a terrier when it comes to murder mysteries) and friends in London and Pennsylvania who hunted them out in second-hand book shops and over the internet. I also carried it with me when I got married. I rediscovered A Shilling for Candles many years later, found it just as riveting, and promptly appropriated my father’s copy. Having read it, I put it back in the trunk and moved on to other books. I enjoyed it thoroughly, especially impressed by the matter-of-fact enterprise of the seventeen year old heroine. It was a vivid shade of green that just escaped being lurid. The cover of the book, which has been lost since, arrested my search. It was probably too hot to go outside to play or to cycle down to the library. I discovered it while rummaging in the steel trunks that housed my father’s collection of books in the large box-room of a rambling Army bungalow. I read my first Tey when I was in middle school. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1997, New York, pp 286

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey