Patricia Moyes

• Born: January 19, 1923
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: August 2, 2000
• Place of death: Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands

Type of Plot: Cozy

Principal Series: Inspector Henry Tibbett, 1959-1993

Contribution

Patricia Moyes wrote her first novel, Dead Men Don’t Ski (1959), on a whim, and she never looked back. She produced a long series with her first novel’s main characters, Scotland Yard detective Henry Tibbett and his wife, Emmy, portraying Henry’s ability to solve crimes through analysis and intuition rather than through violence or typical police procedures. Her books were both critical and popular successes, praised for their intricate plots, their warmth and optimism, and their attention to detail.

Moyes’s novels are peopled with complex characters who stand out from the one-dimensional figures in many mysteries. Even her villains are driven by complicated motives, and Tibbett is sometimes faced with moral ambiguity where he expected certainty. Important contributions of Moyes were the creation of dignified and respected gay and black characters at a time when to do so was rare and her subtle demonstration, through Henry’s and Emmy’s kindness and insight, that empathy can bring different people together.

Moyes’s novels occupy a distinct place in the chronology of mystery and detective stories. She created one of the last great series of cozy detective novels, getting through the entire series without blood or sex on stage. Emmy Tibbett is also one of the last main characters to be a full-time homemaker, although one whose intelligence and bravery are undeniable. Later writers, including Susan Wittig Albert and Diane Mott Davidson, would feature happy couples and relatively bloodless imagery, but their female protagonists would play a more modern role in their domestic lives and in solving crimes.

Moyes’s novels consistently sold well (although she was more popular in the United States than in Great Britain). She won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1971 for Many Deadly Returns (1970). She also received the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999.

Biography

Patricia Moyes was born Patricia Pakenham-Walsh in Dublin, Ireland, on January 19, 1923, to Ernst Pakenham-Walsh and Marion Boyd Pakenham-Walsh. By the age of eight Patricia (known as Penny) had decided to become a writer, and from 1934 to 1939, when she attended the Overstone School, a girls’ boarding academy, her writing skills drew attention and encouragement. She also revealed a gift for languages and became fluent in French, Italian, and other languages. When World War II began in 1939, she lied about her age to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), where she worked until 1945 as a flight officer and radar controller.

Moyes’s next job was working as a technical adviser to the film director and producer Peter Ustinov from 1945 to 1953. She was chosen for the position because Ustinov needed someone with writing ability and knowledge about radar. An eager student, she learned about the film industry from the bottom up. In 1951 she married John Moyes, a photographer, and changed her name to Patricia Moyes, the name she would use throughout her career as a novelist. In 1954 she became an assistant editor for Vogue magazine, writing a monthly column titled “Shophound.” During this period, Moyes crafted an English translation of a French play by Jean Anouilh, which had a successful run in London and on Broadway, earning Moyes enough money to quit the magazine and move to Switzerland. She and her husband divorced in 1959.

Moyes was an excellent sailor and skier, but it was a skiing accident, which laid her up for some months, that gave her the incentive to write her first mystery novel, Dead Men Don’t Ski, featuring the neophyte skiers Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard and his wife, Emmy, a multilingual veteran of the WAAF. Dead Men Don’t Ski would become the first novel in Moyes’s Inspector Henry Tibbett series, the author’s primary occupation over the next three decades.

In 1963 Moyes married James Haszard, an interpreter and lawyer working in the Netherlands at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Haszard shared her passions for sailing and skiing, and the two of them settled into a life that included travel, gourmet dining, and the restoration of an eighteenth century house on the Rhine, which they shared with a series of beloved cats. Several of Moyes’s novels use elements of Haszard’s work as background, as Henry Tibbett solves crimes involving international politics, set in locations where Haszard’s job took the couple. In the early 1970’s, Haszard joined the International Monetary Fund and they moved to Washington, D.C. During this period, Moyes published two successful nonfictional books that appealed to a new group of readers beyond the fans of her mystery novels: After All, They’re Only Cats (1973), a memoir, and How to Talk to Your Cat (1978), a guidebook for pet owners.

When Haszard retired, the couple moved to the British Virgin Islands, settling on the island of Virgin Gorda. They brought their boat and several pets, and Moyes quickly developed a love for her new home. She wrote six more novels from Virgin Gorda, three of them set in the Caribbean. After Haszard died in 1994, Moyes did not write any more novels. She published one collection of short fiction and devoted much of her time to a campaign to protect and neuter the wild cats that lived in the British Virgin Islands. She died at home on August 2, 2000.

Analysis

When Patricia Moyes began writing mysteries, the age of the cozy British detective story of the type written by such notables as Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. Sayers seemed all but over. By the 1960’s, readers had come to expect thrilling action and scenes of sex and violence. In spite of this, Moyes created, in her Inspector Henry Tibbett series, the kind of mysteries she herself liked to read, focusing on interesting and intricate puzzles, exotic locales, and richly drawn characters. At the center of the series is the detective, Henry Tibbett, who rises through the ranks from chief inspector to chief superintendent of Scotland Yard over the course of the series, and his wife, Emmy, a full-time homemaker. Henry is sandy haired and pleasant looking, the kind of man one does not notice in a crowd, and Emmy is plump, athletic, and companionable. The two have been married for some time and are entirely believable as a long-established couple.

In the series, Tibbett and his wife travel to the parts of the world that Moyes knew best: Italy and Switzerland, the Netherlands, London, Washington, D.C., and the Caribbean. They ski and sail, as Moyes did throughout her life. Wherever they go, they befriend local people who confide in the kindly couple, providing information that Tibbett, with the aid of his “nose,” puts together to solve a crime. Common in the novels are comfortable domestic scenes, with the couple conversing in their simple and unfashionable home. However, there are also exciting scenes involving breakneck skiing, deathly hide-and-seek in Dutch canals, kidnapping, murder, and drug smuggling.

Murder à la Mode

A strength of Moyes’s novels is their powerful sense of setting; the writer paid a great deal of attention to getting the small details of a location or an industry correct. Often, she drew on her own experiences to bring the reader into a fascinating corner of the world, as she did in one of her best novels, Murder à la Mode (1963), which revolves around the world of fashion. The novel’s fictional magazine Style resembles Vogue, where Moyes worked for three years while she was in her thirties. Through the course of the novel, readers learn about the different career choices that might bring a clothing designer fame or a steady income, the long and dreary workdays of the models on whom clothing is constructed in a design studio, and the importance to manufacturers of the toile, the cotton model that is an exact copy of a designer original. Typical of Moyes’s work, the mystery involves a crime—the stealing of original dress designs—that could take place only within the given setting.

Moyes drew on her past to create the settings for other novels. Falling Star (1964) involves an actor who is killed while making a film and includes technical information Moyes gained during her years working with Peter Ustinov. In Johnny Under Ground (1965), Moyes’s sixth novel, the plot focuses on Tibbett’s wife Emmy who, like Moyes herself, was a section officer working with radar in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during World War II. When Emmy begins writing a history of her old Air Force base, it leads to the sharing of memories among her former colleagues and then to murder.

Also typical of Moyes’s work is Murder à la Mode’s lack of sex and violence. Although the characters are believable adults, and although Tibbett’s unmarried niece Veronica Spence is suspected of scandalous behavior with her significant other, Donald McKay, there are only hints at sexual behavior. In this novel, the lack of frankness about sex feels old-fashioned—even the police are embarrassed to say that a murder victim may have been pregnant—but in later novels scenes of passion are hardly missed. By the same token, although the cases Tibbett investigates involve murder, international intrigue, and even drug smuggling, there is virtually no blood on stage. Tibbett himself is shot several times through the series, but the bullet nearly always passes neatly through his shoulder.

A final way in which Murder à la Mode is representative is in the character of Nicholas Knight, the first of several gay characters who appear in the series. Knight is a dress designer and an entirely sympathetic character, accepted easily by Henry and Emmy but less so by several other characters. Gay and lesbian characters were not common in popular fiction in the 1960’s, and Moyes included Knight among the mix of humanity populating her novel without emphasizing his sexual orientation to make a political point. Similar characters include Air Force veteran Arthur Price in Johnny Under Ground, interior decorator Denton Westbury in Who Is Simon Warwick? (1978), and tourist Harold Vandike in A Six-Letter Word for Death (1983). Who Is Simon Warwick? also features Sally Benson, a transsexual character. Sexual orientation is not part of the motive or the solution in these novels, but simply a detail that makes Moyes’s characters rich and full.

Murder Fantastical

In her seventh novel, Murder Fantastical (1967), Moyes turned to a more whimsical tone and created her most delightful recurring characters, the eccentric Manciple family of county Fenshire. While Tibbett solves a mystery involving long-hidden jewels, he stays with the Manciples and enjoys tea and conversation with Edwin Manciple, the retired bishop of Bugolaland, who is also an expert at solving British crossword puzzles; wacky Aunt Dora; lovelorn Cousin Maude; the communist revolutionary Frank Mason; and other relatives, who are themselves involved in preparations for the annual fair. The Manciples form an immediate close friendship with Henry and Emmy, and the couple visit the family again when Henry needs help with a crossword puzzle at the heart of a murder in A Six-Letter Word for Death or information about local history and gossip in Twice in a Blue Moon (1993). Moyes had written comedy during her years with Ustinov, and the amusing mysteries featuring the Manciple family are among her best novels.

Death and the Dutch Uncle

With Death and the Dutch Uncle (1968), Moyes introduced a theme that runs through the series: the struggles of newly independent nations to establish autonomy. Death and the Dutch Uncle is set in the Netherlands, at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, where Moyes’s husband James Haszard was employed as an interpreter. The plot revolves around the inner workings of that court as two young nations, Galunga and Mambesi, attempt to resolve a dispute over borders and mining rights. At issue is a series of treaties established by the former French imperialists, and the degree to which the new governments are responsible for upholding those treaties.

Moyes returned to issues of independence and imperialism in Black Widower (1975), set in Washington, D.C., where Moyes and Haszard were living at the time the work was written. The title refers to Sir Edward Ironmonger, the ambassador to the United States from the nation of Tampica, until recently a British colony. Ironmonger is black and is subject to racial stereotyping by Washington bureaucrats and by tourists in Tampica. As she does with homophobia, Moyes does not foreground the issue of racism but makes a subtle point by the fact that all of the characters who make casually racist remarks also reveal other flaws and that Henry and Emmy treat Ironmonger and his compatriots with dignity and respect. The political struggles of young nations surface again in Black Girl, White Girl (1989), another mystery set in Tampica.

As is true of many long series, Moyes’s novels were uneven in quality, but readers looking for an intriguing puzzle with all the clues in place, a close-up view of an exotic location, and a cozy visit with a happily married couple were never disappointed.

Principal Series Character:

• Henry Tibbett begins as an inspector with Scotland Yard and earns steady promotions through the course of the series. He is a small, mild-mannered, happily married, and friendly man who can easily conceal his identity until he springs his trap and catches a criminal. Tibbett solves crimes without violence and without technology; he relies most often on his intelligence, his analytical powers, and his confidence in his instincts, or what he refers to as his “nose.” When Tibbett rubs the back of his neck while deep in thought, the reader knows he is about to unravel a puzzle.

Bibliography

Boucher, Anthony. Introduction to Murder by Threes, by Patricia Moyes. New York: Holt, 1965. In this introduction to a collection of three of Moyes’s novels, Boucher places her among the great British mystery writers of her time.

Boxer, Sarah. “Patricia Moyes, 77, Writer Who Created Sleuthing Pair.” The New York Times, August 11, 2000, p. B9. An obituary and appreciation.

Dubose, Martha Hailey. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. A look at female mystery writers from Mary Roberts Rinehart to cozy writers such as Agatha Christie to modern writers such as Sue Grafton. Gives a sense of Moyes’s place among her contemporaries although it does not specifically mention her.

Dunbar, Jill, and Catherine Sapinsky. “Nancy Drew for Grown-Ups.” Ms. 13 (April, 1985): 101-102. An appreciation for the contributions of female mystery writers whose detectives rely on brains rather than violence. The authors include Moyes among the “contemporary traditionalists.”

Mahoney, MaryKay. “Patricia Moyes.” In Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An analysis of Moyes’s ability to create vivid characters and locales, and comparisons of her work to that of other female mystery writers.

Scherer, Ron. “Tracking Down a Mystery Writer in the Caribbean.” Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 1987, p. 25. Scherer, an avid sailor and a fan of Moyes’s mysteries, tours Virgin Gorda with the writer as his guide.