Customer Reviews
miss pym cops out - By: Nina-Jo Rees, 20 Jul 2008 
An odd book but strangely fascinating. Tey creates a murder mystery setin the long lost world of girls' Physical Ed. colleges & introduces us to an array of 'types': the rich & sociable, the ambitious, & the oddball, like the bizarrely nick-named, flamenco dancing 'Nut Tart'.
The staff too are an arrestingly odd & old fashioned lot. Miss Pym, a self-taught psychologist, finds herself captivated by the atmosphere & energy of the school & drawn into its life & events. For me the atmosphere was the interesting part, a world where girls, even rich ones, were beginning to become independent & work, but still harking back to days of a more formal & restricted activities for young women. Miss Pym has a moral choice to make & whether you feel she makes the right one is up to you. I don't want to spoil the ending but it is extraordinarily idiosyncratic....morally questionable even.
If you have ever attended an all girls' boarding school yourself you will find yourself reminded of sights & sounds of communal life that you thought you had long ago forgotten.
Not about outward beauty - By: J. Parker, 17 Mar 2008 
The clue isin the title Miss Pym Disposes.
She has three chances to make a decision to affect the fate of another person & each time she gets it wrong, even though she lecturesin psychology & might think she understands the human mind. Discuss?
That misunderstanding is what is at the heart of the story.
The fate of the girls who are at this school post WW11 is only half of the story - the other half is what Miss Pym does with what she knows & who is affected by her decisions.
Of course, there is a lot about the beauty or otherwise of the students at Leys College & the hard work they do. It is crucial to them all what work they will get, if they want it & not all of them do, but for different reasons. I think Tey manages to create a claustrophobic atmosphere & explain it so well.
It's a fascinating read. Tey spends most of the book setting the scene so that the crime comes almost at the end but the book is nevertheless engrosssing.
Tey isin my view an under-rated author - she wrote books that appear to be crime novels but I don't feel they are intended to be that, although she can do the twist at the end if she wants to want to, as with this book.
She was more interested I feelin creating characters & atmosphere than the crime story which I think was more a vehicle for what she wanted to say about peoplein general.
A dark tale in Golden Age clothing - By: S.B., 09 Jan 2007 This is a very dark & nasty tale,in the clothing of a cutesy rompin the Golden Age of detective fiction. Miss Lucy Pym, the celebrated scourge of the psychological establishment, has been invited to give a lecture to the physically perfect specimens of the Leys Training College. The institution has its share of politics, in-fighting & petty injustices, vividly portrayed here, but what Miss Pym does not expect to encounter is murder.
Superficially, this was very enjoyable to read; a classic detective story with a rather nice twist to the ending, plenty of well-drawn characters & enough subplots to become a soap opera.
But scratch the beautiful surface of the Leys' girls, trained to be something between gym teachers & nurses. For a generation that has lost its young menin the trenches, these are more women than can be married off, more women than anyone, including themselves, knows what to do with. Miss Pym herself has achieved celebrity by sheer accident. The old friend who runs the College has achieved her postion 'in spite', not 'because' of, & on graduation, the girls are assigned jobs by their headmistress, prisoner turned gaoler, rather than choosing for themselves.
Tey makes a rather radical statement here about choice & control of ones life, how beauty (and I'm afraid that for the duration of the book, we must accept that outer equals inner beauty) counts for little, & justice can be achieved only by subversion of the status quo. The message, I am grateful to say, is fairly much out of date; it's rarely necessaryin the twenty-first century to commit murder to have the chance of a decent career. That it might have been once should still give us pause.
