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Aug. 13th, 2021 11:23 pmThe last battered yellow paperback I allowed myself before returning to (overdue) library books was Josephine Tey's To Love and Be Wise, a mystery novel that various people recommended to me when I posted about Brat Farrar a few years ago and were absolutely correct to do so.
The central plot of To Love and Be Wise goes as follows: a devastatingly beautiful young man visits a small village that's been overrun with Creative Types on the basis of a professed mutual acquaintance with one of the Creative Types, a young man who hosts a deeply saccharine BBC show about The Virtues of the English Countryside and who is heir to aunt's Romance Novel Fortune. The devastatingly beautiful one man has only one acquaintance in the UK, an estranged lady painter cousin, so appears more than happy to hang out in the village for an indefinite period of time.
Everyone in the village -- from the romance novelist aunt, to the local famous gay playwright, to the saccharine BBC host's sensible and clever fiancee, to indeed book police detective Inspector Alan Grant -- finds themselves uncomfortably attracted to this devastatingly beautiful young man! Comparisons are made to demons and fallen angels. The saccharine BBC host's tolerance for his devastatingly beautiful guest diminishes by the day, but he nonetheless acquiesces when the devastatingly beautiful young man proposes that they collaborate on a book-and-photography boat trip ...
... in the middle of which the devastatingly beautiful young man disappears, presumed drowned-or-murdered, and Josephine Tey's favorite Inspector Grant is called in to start doing thoughtful character studies on all the Creative Types in the village to attempt to crack the case.
Tey's Grant is a bit similar to Marsh's Inspector Alleyn, but (in my recent experience of him) more endearing to me because he is less judgmental; Alleyn usually only really approves of a very few people in any given book and occasionally oozes a sense of moral arbitration, whereas Grant occasionally takes a scunner to someone particularly awful but generally is ready to be extremely charmed by the pleasant absurdity of humanity. I enjoyed riding along with him in A Shilling for Candles, my last Tey, and enjoyed it again here.
However, I am well aware that the reason everyone correctly recommended this book to me is
( TOTAL BOOK SPOILERS, DO NOT CLICK IF YOU PLAN TO READ )
The central plot of To Love and Be Wise goes as follows: a devastatingly beautiful young man visits a small village that's been overrun with Creative Types on the basis of a professed mutual acquaintance with one of the Creative Types, a young man who hosts a deeply saccharine BBC show about The Virtues of the English Countryside and who is heir to aunt's Romance Novel Fortune. The devastatingly beautiful one man has only one acquaintance in the UK, an estranged lady painter cousin, so appears more than happy to hang out in the village for an indefinite period of time.
Everyone in the village -- from the romance novelist aunt, to the local famous gay playwright, to the saccharine BBC host's sensible and clever fiancee, to indeed book police detective Inspector Alan Grant -- finds themselves uncomfortably attracted to this devastatingly beautiful young man! Comparisons are made to demons and fallen angels. The saccharine BBC host's tolerance for his devastatingly beautiful guest diminishes by the day, but he nonetheless acquiesces when the devastatingly beautiful young man proposes that they collaborate on a book-and-photography boat trip ...
... in the middle of which the devastatingly beautiful young man disappears, presumed drowned-or-murdered, and Josephine Tey's favorite Inspector Grant is called in to start doing thoughtful character studies on all the Creative Types in the village to attempt to crack the case.
Tey's Grant is a bit similar to Marsh's Inspector Alleyn, but (in my recent experience of him) more endearing to me because he is less judgmental; Alleyn usually only really approves of a very few people in any given book and occasionally oozes a sense of moral arbitration, whereas Grant occasionally takes a scunner to someone particularly awful but generally is ready to be extremely charmed by the pleasant absurdity of humanity. I enjoyed riding along with him in A Shilling for Candles, my last Tey, and enjoyed it again here.
However, I am well aware that the reason everyone correctly recommended this book to me is
( TOTAL BOOK SPOILERS, DO NOT CLICK IF YOU PLAN TO READ )
