Angel with Two Faces

Author’s Note

Angel With Two Faces is a work of fiction, inspired by real places, real lives and, in some cases, real events, and is a tribute to the unique beauty of Porthleven, the Loe Pool, and the Penrose Estate, as well as to the people who live and work there. It’s a community that I love being part of – one which does indeed turn a face to the past as well as to the present, and is all the more special for that.

Josephine Tey was one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) during a versatile and successful career as a novelist and playwright; the other, Gordon Daviot, was reserved for plays, historical fiction and a biography. Unravelling her life through her work and her letters continues to be a fascinating journey, and the Josephine Tey who appears in Angel With Two Faces blends some of what we know about Elizabeth Mackintosh with the personality which emerges so strongly from her eight crime novels – novels which have always been widely regarded as some of the finest and most original to emerge from the Golden Age period.

In reality, Tey did, of course, finish the book we see her writing here, although it was not set in Cornwall. A Shilling for Candles was published in 1936, and went on to be the basis of Hitchcock’s film, Young and Innocent. In her book, Tey’s murder victim – the actress Christine Clay – leaves her fortune ‘for the preservation of the beauty of England’, something which the author herself would do less than twenty years later, when, after her premature death at the age of 55, she left her estate and the royalties from her writing to the National Trust for England in a special Daviot Fund.

I’m sure she would be delighted to know that the Loe Pool and the Penrose Estate are now in the safe hands of the National Trust, and some of the author’s proceeds from Angel With Two Faces will go to support the Trust’s work on the Estate.