To Love and Be Wise

[sawyl]

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.