I had vaguely heard of her earlier novel Brat Farrar (1949), but until I was sent a copy – by Penguin – as one of their reissued ‘Green’ classics, I had never got round to reading it. That said there is no viciousness in her attitude and the author comes across as a pleasant person who you would like to meet. In addition, like the author Beatrix Potter, she left all the proceeds from her estate, including the royalties from her books, to the “National Trust” . It is about a young man, the Brat Farrar of the title, who is claiming to be the heir to a large estate.

Brat becomes well coached in the family lore and is able to convince the family that he really is Patrick and that he didn't commit suicide, but ran away to America where he learnt horsemanship. That Simon’s resistance is both stronger and stranger than is completely accountable on those terms occurs, after a while, to Brat and to us, and thus the more sinister question arises: where was Simon when Patrick disappeared, presumably to his self-inflicted death?As he spends quality time with the family, he discovers through various clues that Simon has a sinister and mean side to him. It suffers from comparison with du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, which is better in many ways but particularly the feeling that everything could crumble at any point. Also, Brat had been unaccountably puzzled, when a woman wanted to marry him, even though he was a “kept man”.

The only other examples I can think of are The Wife of Martin Guerre (same thing as the film you mention, I am assuming! He read it as a young man and has been talking our young adult children, who are very interested in mystery. The Tichborne Case was a notorious legal dispute, which had gripped Victorian England in the 1860s and 1870s.At this same table had eaten Ashbys who had died of fever in India, of wounds in the Crimea, of starvation in Queensland, of typhoid at the Cape, and of cirrhosis of the liver in the Straits settlements.

Simon is set to inherit the family estate when he turns twenty one as both parents died in a aeroplane crash when he and his twin Patrick were young. This sets Tey up to include lots of horsiness in the novel, just for its own sake and for the fun of show-jumping and racing. However, we the readers know from the beginning that Brat is an imposter, and despite his involvement in the fraudulent scheme to assume the Ashby fortune, we like him.The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick's mannerisms, appearance and every significant detail of Patrick's early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. She has kept the estate running by creating a profitable business from the family stables, so that the family now breeds, sells and trains horses, and give riding lessons. It turned out to be a real page turner, so well written that I was wishing for it to go for at least another 300 pages. The only image I and many others may have of Lady Godiva is of a beautiful woman riding a fine horse across a landscape just like the character in the Tey book! My old housemate, and dear friend, Kirsty has three abiding passions: dogs, lexicography, and talking about how great Josephine Tey is.