Tight, clean, flat, square, crisp and sharp book in DJ with light wear and small nicks. Owner's name, dated, 1958. Glue stain typical to the era. The three novels in this volume were written by Elizabeth MacKintosh in the years immediately following WW2, and published under the pen name of Josephine Tey. They are all, in their way, hymns to a vanishing England; they all have rural settings, and deal with a relatively restricted community; and although there is a peripheral police presence in some of them, the detective figure, if any, is an amateur. But you don't read these books primarily as whodunits; Tey was less ingenious in plot construction than Christie; indeed she confessed to having difficulty in writing original stories, and two of these novels are based on historical events. But she is a far better writer, with a feel for the countryside, a fine ear for dialogue, a straightforward style, and a nice sense of humor. Miss Pym Disposes (1947), the earliest book of the three, literally inhabits a closed community, a residential physical education college for women. Miss Pym, who has achieved a certain fame as the author of a book of pop psychology, is the only outsider. The artificiality of the setting cannot be denied, and the conversations among the students, referring to one another only by last names, seem strange to modern ears. But the relative isolation from outside laws is essential to the ending of the story, whose outcome Miss Pym, not the police, must decide. The Franchise Affair (1948) also features an isolated house, but this one is bleak and forbidding, set behind walls some distance from a market town. It is the kind of place to start rumors, and indeed its current inhabitants?an older woman and her adult daughter?are accused of kidnapping and maltreating a young girl. But the main focus of the book is the interplay between these outsiders and the locals; the go-between, our reluctant hero and eventual detective, is a fortyish country lawyer, hitherto set in his ways and approaching a comfortable middle age of his own. An isolated country house also forms the main setting for the third and best book, Brat Farrar (1949). But, in contrast to the Franchise, this is a centuries-old horse farm in the South Downs, and the book as a whole is a luxuriant celebration of the traditions of English country life. The death in Miss Pym does not occur until three-quarters of the way into the book; most of the novel is spent building up the character relationships, as Miss Pym herself becomes fonder of the young students, and gradually extends her stay at the school. But because these characters are the hardest to translate into the modern world, this book is now the least effective of the three. The crime in The Franchise Affair is not a murder, but at first it seems an open-and-shut case, and one of the most interesting things about it is the length of time that the question of guilt and innocence hangs in the balance. Technically, Brat Farrar is even more audacious. It is the story of a long-lost son come back to claim his inheritance; the boy had gone missing in his early teens, apparently drowned in the sea, whether by accident or suicide; but the death could also have been faked by a determined runaway. The young man who presents himself, who now uses the name of Bratt Farrar, closely resembles the surviving twin brother. Yet the reader knows very early on that the claimant is in fact an impostor, coached by an unscrupulous neighbor who hopes to share in the inheritance