Josephine Tey

Brat Farrar Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar (1949) is one of my favourite books. It isn't science fiction or fantasy, it was published as a mystery novel. It also falls into the special genre I call "double identity."Brat Farrar is a young man with a pronounced family resemblance to the Ashby family, of Lodings. A brother of about his age supposedly committed suicide-his body was never found-at the age of thirteen. If twenty-one year old Brat were the dead Patrick, he'd inherit the estate and all the money over the head of the smiling confident Simon Ashby. Brat encounters Alec, a rogue who knows the Ashbys well and Alec immediately concocts a plot. Brat is drawn into the affair at first from curiosity and later from a desire to avenge Patrick. This is a murder mystery as well as a double identity story, but the murder Brat is investigating is that of his own double, and he can't reveal the truth without revealing his own deception.