Kif

by Josephine Tey

Archibald ‘Kif’ Vicar is an orphan, a country boy who grows to manhood in the hell of the trenches on the Western Front. The war ends and Kif finds himself alone, homeless, penniless, without work. Until he meets Baba… wild, beautiful Baba, the sister of a criminal. Driven by his passion for Baba, Kif embarks on a life of crime. And drifts, inevitably, towards his tragic end.

293 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 10, 2023

About the author

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant.

The first of these, The Man in the Queue (1929) was published under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot , whose name also appears on the title page of another of her 1929 novels, Kif; An Unvarnished History. She also used the Daviot by-line for a biography of the 17th century cavalry leader John Graham, which was entitled Claverhouse (1937).

Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. The district of Daviot, near her home of Inverness in Scotland, was a location her family had vacationed. The name Gordon does not appear in either her family or her history.

Elizabeth Mackintosh came of age during World War I, attending Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham, England during the years 1915 - 1918. Upon graduation, she became a physical training instructor for eight years. In 1926, her mother died and she returned home to Inverness to care for her invalid father. Busy with household duties, she turned to writing as a diversion, and was successful in creating a second career.

Alfred Hitchcock filmed one of her novels, A Shilling for Candles (1936) as Young and Innocent in 1937 and two other of her novels have been made into films, The Franchise Affair (1948), filmed in 1950, and 'Brat Farrar' (1949), filmed as Paranoiac in 1963. In addition, a number of her works have been dramatised for radio.

Her novel The Daughter of Time (1951) was voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990.

Miss Mackintosh never married, and died at the age of 55, in London. A shy woman, she is reported to have been somewhat of a mystery even to her intimate friends. While her death seems to have been a surprise, there is some indication she may have known she was fatally ill for some time prior to her passing.

Reviews

[Tanya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm almost frightened for him sometimes, and I don't in the least know why. I think perhaps because he is so tremendously in love with life. People who are that are simply asking to get hurt. [loc. 1075]

A flawed but fascinating novel about Kif, who joins the Army at 15 (he's big for his age) to escape the grinding monotony of rural life as an orphan; makes friends with his fellow soldiers; doesn't adjust well to post-war civilian life, and -- after a disastrous business failure -- falls in love with Baba, sister of a friend from the war, whose family induct Kif into a shadowy world of crime.

This is nowhere near as well-written or as well-observed as The Expensive Halo, but Tey's understated account, and her depiction of a young man almost entirely alienated from his fellow humans, kept me reading to the tragic finale.

I do wonder if Tey intended some of the loose threads -- the spiritualist's vision, the culpability of Collins,  Hough's involvement in the business failure -- to be picked up later in the novel. It might have made Kif's story twistier and more interesting.

The edition available as an ebook from Amazon is not great (for one thing, someone has been through and done a global replace of 'arni' to 'tingle': look at the Amazon cover!) but Kif is in the public domain, so can be acquired from Project Gutenberg etc. Meanwhile, I shall keep Tey's other novels for future reading.

[Sue Bridgwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ultimately heartbreaking story of life in Britain as it was for demobbed servicemen: well worth reading.