She is engaged in “a constant and bitter war” with her weaker self, who seems to want to do as little as possible and her other self who doesn’t want to make a bad impression. She not very confident, She describes herself as having been “the little fourth-form rabbit” at school. Miss Pym is not at all the kind of person I’d expect to be at the centre of a 1940’s detective story. What follows is a lightly-written, fast-paced, humour-filled set of encounters between Miss Pym and a variety of students that build Miss Pym’s character, starts to sketch the very large number of students and staff the story is going to involve and establishes the over-amplified, so-constantly-stressed-no-one-notices-anymore atmosphere of an all-girls Physical Training College. When a bell rang in Miss Pym’s life now it was because she had put a delicately varnished finger-tip on the bell-push.” “Once upon a time she too had lived a life regulated by bells, but that was long ago. She regards the bell as excessive and is glad that its summons does not apply to her anymore. The bell is part of the regimen of the girl’s school she has stayed overnight at after being the guest external speaker on Friday evening.

She’s been woken at 05.30 by a clamorous bell that she’s doing her best to ignore. Instead, I found myself in the company of a woman who is described as “Little Miss Pym” and who, like me, was avoiding getting out of bed. It seems my subconscious had, on the basis of the title alone, classified Miss Pym as an older single-woman spending her time sharpening the cutting edge of her insight on the strop of other people’s weaknesses à la Miss Marple. I woke to one of those gloomy, rain-sodden, spirit-sapping mornings that England seems to be specialising in at the moment and decided that breakfast could wait until after I’d made a start on “Miss Pym Disposes”, which, happily, turned out to be not at all what I was expecting.

Miss pym disposes author