Two for Sorrow - the latest Josephine Tey/Archie Penrose mystery

Here I am again grousing about a book I thought I was going to be giving five stars. This third mystery in which the amateur detective is Josephine Tey has a clever and complicated plot. But the book, which is nearly 500 pages long, should have been closer to 300. The author couldn't resist throwing the kitchen sink in there: a plea for prison reform, a description of women's prisons at the turn of the 20th century, a history of "baby farming," and a lengthy and boring subplot in which a character from a previous book tells Josephine that she loves her and Josephine anguishes over how she feels about this woman.

I think the subplot is a failed attempt to round out the character of Tey, which is flat and one dimentional. That is not a complaint. I don't expect my fictional detectives to be real people. Miss Marple is perfect the way she is. The detectives in the Deborah Crombie and Susan Hill mysteries are a surprising exception. There was no need for the boring and ultimately ineffectual lesbian relationship, which slowed down the action annoyingly.

The book begins with Tey starting a new detective novel in which she takes an historical situation and plans to fictionalize it. Two women in 1902 are running a scheme where one of them, a nurse and midwife, runs a home for unwed mothers. When the babies are born she takes money from the young mothers to place the children in homes where they will be welcomed and loved. Unfortunately, instead of adoption it is death that awaits these children. A second woman takes the babies away, kills them, and disposes of the bodies.

Grim as this is the plot is based on a real case and reference is made to another woman who did much the same thing only abandoned the babies rather than killing them. It was called baby farming. As the fictional Tey researches this practice she becomes embroiled in a murder that takes place in the book's present, 1936. The motive seems to be an attempt to keep the murdered woman from telling what she knows about the baby farming case of 30 years before.

Archie Penrose's cousins are busy making sets and costumes and evening dresses for a gala fund-raiser for a nursing school and attached women's club, a club to which the real life Tey belonged. The scramble to get everything done on time, the internal politics of the nursing vs the club factions, the ongoing murder investigation in the middle of this chaos - these are excellently well done and I was engrossed in the story.

But the author kept stopping dead in the water to talk about how a particular woman prison manager allowed female prisoners to have mirrors and photographs in their cells at Holloway Prison. Or to lecture us on how uncivilized hanging was. (It was, actually, but the middle of a fast-moving mystery plot is not the place to discuss it.) The lesbian sub-plot dragged very slowly. I read it carefully because I assumed there was some carefully placed clue there that would lead to the identify of the killer. There wasn't.

So instead of the 5 stars that this book would have earned if a tough editor had forced the author to control herself and focus on the story - the book gets only 2 stars. I am exceedingly disappointed because there is so much potential for this series to become really first rate. I'm putting my hopes on the next volume of Tey/Penrose adventures.

2012  No 15

Comments

[Elaine Simpson-Long]

I gave up after reading the second in this 'Tey' series as I thought it so meandering and badly written. I do rather object to the author using Josephine Tey as the attraction of these books. The test is, take Josephine Tey out of the equation, call her Joan Hardy (or any name you can think of) and would they be worth reading? Would they be interesting? The answer is no and that is enough for me

[Mary]

An interesting idea, Elaine, and you're right, the name Tey is carrying a lot of weight for these mysteries. But I did think the plots of the last two were good if they hadn't had so much hanging on them, dragging them down.

[Margaret Powling]

I got almost to the end of the first 'Tey' novel, but gave up. I simply lost interest, finding it all unbelievable. The best thing about the paperback was the rather attractive 1920s style cover, but as I've learned before, a pretty cover does not always a good book make. A shame as I wanted to enjoy this series.
Margaret P

[Mary]

Alas, Margaret, I've never learned the lesson about delightful covers on less than delightful books.