Brat Farrar
Brat Farrar ( German title : Der Erbe von Latchetts ) is a 1949 novel by the English writer Josephine Tey .
content
Tragedies had hit the Ashby family too often. The young parents of two 13-year-old twin sons died in a plane crash ; the older twin, Patrick, later disappeared after leaving a suicide note on the cliffs near their home. Patrick's brother Simon became heir to the Latchetts family estate, while Aunt Beatrice "Bee" holds the family together, slowly expanding the mare farm and stables into a business that will earn them a livelihood until Simons grows up and profit from his inheritance. A few weeks before Simon's 21st birthday, a young man appears who pretends to be Patrick.
Not only does he look like an Ashby, he also has the familial gift for handling horses and the genteel reserve that reminds Aunt Bee of the little boy she had mourned over the years. But "Patrick" is a con man and was unlucky all his life under his real name Brat Farrar until he heard of the fate of the Ashby family and, at the insistence of Alec Loding, risked everything in this insane deception. He falls in love with the house, with Aunt Bee and the entire Ashby lifestyle. Aside from the serenity of Latchetts, there are dark secrets that only the arrival of Brat can shed light on.
Unusual, subtle and filled with unforgettable characterizations experimented Josephine Teys book brilliantly with the traditional Mystery - Genre . In Brat Farrar , the reader knows from the start that Brat is not who he claims to be, which, as Ruth Rendell explains in the introduction of a new edition, strangely gives the novel more tension than if the author embraced us only at the end Paths weakly surprised ("a greater tension than if its author had led us up the garden path to be qeakly surprised at the end").
The pleasure of the book lies in unraveling other secrets: the process of uncovering old crimes and scandals, together with the brooding danger of the present, is described by Ruth Rendell as a point of almost unbearable stress ").
filming
The fabric of the novel in 1986 as a six-part television series entitled Brat Farrar - A dead man returns with Mark Greenstreet (as Simon Ashby / Brat Farrar), Francis Matthews (as Alec Loding) and Angela Browne (as Beatrice Ashby) of Leonard Lewis filmed and broadcast on DFF and later also on Kabel Eins .
Web links and sources
- Brat Farrar (Google Books)
- Review (Jandy's Books)
- Review (Writers News Weekly)
- New Books 2010 ( Folio Society Catalog )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Brat Farrar - A dead man returns (series dictionary) ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Brat Farrar (IMDb)
