Sunday, January 2, 2022



 


KIF:  AN UNVARNISHED HISTORY

Elizabeth Mackintosh  (Josephine Tey). 1896-1952


Before WWI, Archibald Vicar, as a recently orphaned boy, was working for a farmer in England.  He found the work really boring, consisting of swamping out barns and cleaning up after various sorts of animal.  When a newly formed Regiment happened to pass through the local town, he decided to join up.  Being of over-average height and strength, he had no difficulty in pretending he was eighteen, the regulation age for recruits, even though he'd just celebrated his fifteenth birthday.  As it happened, he was shipped to France shortly after and spent the next four years fighting in the trenches except for nine months in the hospital after being wounded.  He liked to read but liked boxing better.  His training involved learning to scrounge, wangle, and to take cover amid "unspeakable conditions".  James Barclay, a friend, took him home during one of their leaves and introduced him to his family;  he was very impressed with the sister, Ann, although he came to understand that the Barclays were members of a higher social class than he was.  After the war Kif returned to London where he spent a lot of time drifting from job to job, as there were lots of ex-soldiers and not many desirable positions.  He fell in with a couple of bookies and was persuaded into joining them in starting up a business, taking bets on horse races and charging a small fee for doing the paperwork involved.  Things went along swimmingly until Kif came to work one morning and discovered that one of the partners had absconded with all the cash, including almost all of Kif's savings.  Back on the street, he was on the point of despair when one of his old soldier friends, Thomas Carroll, found him and invited him to stay with him and his family.  Soon after Kif got a job as a traveling salesman in soap, but found it not very satisfying nor remunerative.  

At this point he realized that father Carroll was a burglar and that Thomas helped him sometimes.  Gradually they brought Kif into the family business and soon made him a fully functioning member of the enterprise.  Until he was caught one night he was caught by a local bobby and sentenced to 21 months at hard labor.  When he got out, he tried to create an honest life for himself, but was unsuccessful.  One employer after another either turned him down or fired him because of his low class history or because of his recent conviction and sentence.  So he went back to live with the Carrolls and helped them with their illicit financial acquisitions.  One night after a series of successful ventures, he went out on his own, planning on a jewelry heist at a country mansion.  The first part went okay, but as he was busy drilling a hole in the safe's door, the owner appeared and fired a revolver at him.  Without thinking, Kif returned fire, killing the man.  He ran off in desperation, but was eventually apprehended.  A long trial was the result, but things didn't look good for the defense.  

This was Ms. Mackintosh's first book.  She was later destined to be the author of the very successful and admired series of detective novels featuring inspector Grant, but this effort was pretty obviously inspired by Ms. M's feelings of anger and despair over the treatment received by soldiers returning to the country that they'd risked their lives for.  She made it very clear that the English class structure and attitudes had a lot to do with the dire experiences shared by the majority of the lower class soldiers who had ventured everything for their country and received so very little for their efforts.  So, although this book had sort of a plot, and some interesting character development, it resembled an extended anti-social screed more than a standard novel.  Not to say that it wasn't well done, because it was;  it was quite moving and persuasive about societal attitudes and behaviors endemic to that period, and which are probably evident today as well...  But justice for all has pretty well taken a back bench in our times due to the overwhelming presence of other problems involving the future of the species...

The picture at top is of Flanders Field.

13 comments:

  1. I had never heard of this one, though I have to admit I don't know Josephine Tey all that well. Sounds it could be effective, though.

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    1. it was published in '29, so would be a bit out of date, now... but she was still an excellent writer. a sample: "any morning is a morning for setting out, but two are indeed: a damp spring morning when the little wind is full of the scent of growing things and the sky has lifted from forgotten horizons; and an autumn morning, still and faintly frosty and full of mellow sunlight when the hedges are cut and the trees tidied from the walks."

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  2. I read quite a lot of Josephine Tey books back in my days of reading mostly mysteries, but I had never heard of this one, her first.

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    1. i still read a lot of mysteries, almost exclusively from the "Golden Age"... but i'm a bit more eclectic nowadays... JT wrote several "practice" books under her real name while she was becoming a novelist, but her main interest was in the drama: she wrote a lot of plays, some of which were quite successful...

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  3. Tey is about my favorite mystery writer and I hate that she wrote so few of them. I'm like you, I love golden age mysteries. I've just finished up a pile of them that have been reprinted by the British Crime Library.

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    1. those are pretty great publications... lots of $, tho... hope you're feeling better...

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  4. Kif's story sounds a little depressing. I think I'll just stick with her mysteries instead. :)

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    1. it was, yes... i purposely left off the ending as it, although harmonious with the whole text, it was nevertheless dire...

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  5. It sounds much more interesting than a book that just had a plot. I've read a couple of Tey's mysteries and so enjoyed her writing so I will search this one out!

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    1. i thought it was interesting because it more or less revealed Tey's early talent for vivid description and other novelistic skills, but i don't think i'd recommend it for much else unless British social problems following WWI are of concern... but what do i know, you might love it!, lol...

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  6. For some strange reason I can't comment on blogger unless I'm on the home computer. I tried to comment last night using my phone but couldn't. It's frustrating because I often can't comment on Wordpress blogs unless I'm using my phone & I keep forgetting...
    Anyhow, last night my daughter was asking me for some free good books on kindle so I dropped in here!
    We've both read all Tey's detective books but none written under Mackintosh. :)

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    1. i've had trouble commenting in the past also... on Google and Wordpress both. it all depends on the phases of the moon, i guess... i read Ms. Mackintosh's account of Henry Morgan, "The Privateer" which i thought was better than this one. she also wrote a lot of plays and short stories under the pseudonym "Gordon Daviot"... i don't recall whether i mentioned the Roy Glashan library, found under Gutenberg Australia: lots of free books, mysteries of all sorts and others. it's one of the places i've found good stuff...

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  7. I like her mysteries but had no idea she started out with something like this. I've been reading the Inspector Grant books with my ears because the library has several (all?) of the audiobooks available for download.

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