Josephine Tey's Alan Grant

Repost from 2005.

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The best description of Josephine Tey's novels is comedy of manners. My favorite of her books is To Love and Be Wise in which she lightly, but elegantly, satirizes modern novelists in a small village, including the super profound novelist, Silas Weekly, who writes about manure and adultery and corruption in rural locations. A character remarks that the literary press adored Silas until he became popular; then, they decided he was old hat.

Tey's detective is Alan Grant, and one of the nice things about Grant is that he is imperfect. I don't mean imperfect in the "let's deconstruct his flaws" sense; I mean imperfect in the sense that Tey herself stands apart from Grant. She doesn't defend him. 

With Ngaoi Marsh, I always feel that Marsh is trying to convince me what a truly nice guy Alleyn is. Christie is more detached from Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, but in terms of detection, they make no errors. And Sayers was invested in explicating Wimsey's personality, which is entirely appropriate to the kind of novels that she wrote. 

But Grant is simply, just, this guy, ya know (as somebody says of somebody else in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). 

John Vine plays Grant

in 1988 Franchise Affair

He is fully admirable, being intelligent and diligent. Like Alleyn, he is looked up to by his sidekick, but Grant comes right out and admits that he likes a little adulation. (Alleyn has to pretend that he isn't being hero-worshiped, which must be a strain.) Grant is rather detached himself. His cousin, Laura, can never get him to marry, and Grant misses several opportunities simply because he isn't paying attention. He isn't absent-minded; his detachment comes from a kind of indifference; after all, Grant doesn't want to get married. He is more Archie Goodwin than Wimsey. His female love interest (sort of) is Marta, an actress, who doesn't want to get married either and usually scares men. She latches onto the confident Grant.

As well as tremendous confidence, Grant is somewhat prideful, not in the "I'm better than others" sense, but in his sureness about his own abilities. He has a "flare" for odd situations, but he isn't even remotely the insightful, thoughtful, concerned, all-knowing, tortured detective of so much detective fiction. He likes being a cog in a machine. And despise his flaws, he isn't unlikable. 

His full character is a remarkable feat of writing, in part because it is so lightly rendered. 

Tey books in order of my preference:

• To Love and Be Wise (Grant) 
• Franchise Affair (Grant has a cameo appearance) 
• Daughter of Time (Grant)  
• Brat Farrar  
• The Singing Sands (Grant) 
• A Shilling for Candles (Grant) 
• Man in the Queue (Grant) 
• Miss Pym Disposes