To Love and Be Wise

On to what is probably my favourite Tey novel, To Love and Be Wise, which certainly features one of the best mysteries of the Alan Grant series of novels. Set in a small village colonised by a group of eccentric writers and artists, it uses the arrival of a Mephistophelean stranger to stoke up an almost gothic atmosphere of impending doom.

A chance encounter at a party leads Lavinia Fitch to invites the American photographer Leslie Searle to stay with her in Salcott St Mary. The charismatic Searle strikes the village like a meteorite, charming the locals, teasing the resident artists, befriending Fitch's nephew Walter Whitmore and all but seducing Whitmore's fiancée Liz Garrowby. When Searle vanishes midway through a canoeing trip — he and Whitmore having decided to collaborate on a travelogue — Whitmore finds himself suspected of murder.

To Love... befits from a strong mystery plot — not always a feature of Tey's novels — that plays admirably fair by the reader. The village of Salcott St Mary feels wonderfully real, while the crazy cast of local writers has a definite whiff of satire about it. I'm sure that Silas Weekley has more than a touch of DH Lawrence about him, and Walter Whitmore, with his BBC broadcasts about rural nature, must have been modelled on someone like Ralph Wightman — I don't actually know much about Wightman so I'm extrapolating from Arthur Fallowfield, Kenneth Williams' take-off of Whightman from Beyond Our Ken.