Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym used by Elizabeth MacKintosh (25 July 1896 – 13 February 1952), a Scottish author best known for her mystery novels. She also wrote as Gordon Daviot, under which name she wrote plays, many with biblical or historical themes.

Life and work

MacKintosh was born in Inverness, the daughter of Colin MacKintosh and Josephine (née Horne). She attended Inverness Royal Academy and then Anstey Physical Training College in Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham. She taught physical training at various schools in England and Scotland, but in 1923 she returned to Inverness to care for her invalid mother, and stayed after her mother's death that year to keep house for her father.[1] There she began her career as a writer.[2]

MacKintosh's best-known books were written under the name of Josephine Tey. Josephine was her mother's first name; the source of Tey is unclear.[2]

In five of the mystery novels, all of which except the first she wrote under the name of Tey, the hero is Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant. (Grant appears in a sixth, The Franchise Affair, as a minor character.) The most famous of these is The Daughter of Time, in which Grant, laid up in hospital, has friends research reference books and contemporary documents so that he can puzzle out the mystery of whether King Richard III of England murdered his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. Grant comes to the firm conclusion that King Richard was totally innocent of the death of the Princes.

The Franchise Affair also has a historical context: although set in the 1940s, it is based on the 18th-century case of Elizabeth Canning. The Daughter of Time was the last of Tey's books published during her lifetime. A further crime novel, The Singing Sands, was found in her papers and published posthumously.

About a dozen one-act plays and another dozen full-length plays were written under the name of Gordon Daviot. How she chose the name of Gordon is unknown, but Daviot was the name of a scenic locale near Inverness where she had spent many happy holidays with her family.[2] Only four of her plays were produced during her lifetime. Richard of Bordeaux was particularly successful, running for 14 months and making a household name of its young leading man and director, John Gielgud. (Humorously, Tey writes of Inspector Alan Grant that "he had in his youth seen Richard of Bordeaux; four times he had seen it".[3])

Death

Tey was intensely private, shunning all publicity throughout her life. During her last year, when she knew that she was mortally ill, she resolutely avoided all her friends as well. Her penultimate work, The Privateer (1952), was a romantic novel based on the life of the buccaneer Henry Morgan. Her last work, The Singing Sands, was found among her papers after her death and was published posthumously. She died of liver cancer at her sister Mary's home in London on 13 February 1952. Most of her friends were unaware that she was even ill, including Gielgud, who was shocked to read news of it in The Times during a matinee performance of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

Proceeds from Tey's estate, including royalties from her books, were assigned to the National Trust.

Appearances and adaptations in other works

The heroine of Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree (1961) uses Tey's book Brat Farrar as a model when impersonating the missing heir to an estate. She describes the book as "the best of them all".

Tey is mentioned in the Stephen King novella, Apt Pupil (1982).

Tey appears as a main character in a series of novels by Nicola Upson called the "Josephine Tey Mysteries". An Expert in Murder (2008), the first in the series, is a detective story woven around the original production of Richard of Bordeaux.

The Daughter of Time influenced later mystery writers, notably Barbara Mertz. Mertz, writing as Elizabeth Peters, refers explicitly to Tey in The Murders of Richard III, which sets a country house murder mystery among a group who believe that Richard III was innocent.

Reception and legacy

In 1990, The Daughter of Time was selected by the British Crime Writers' Association as the greatest mystery novel of all time; The Franchise Affair was 11th on the same list of 100 books.

In 2012, Peter Hitchens wrote that, "Josephine Tey's clarity of mind, and her loathing of fakes and of propaganda, are like pure, cold spring water in a weary land", and

what she loves above all is to show that things are very often not what they seem to be, that we are too easily fooled, that ready acceptance of conventional wisdom is not just dangerous, but a result of laziness, incuriosity and of a resistance to reason.[4]

Publications

Mystery novels

Inspector Alan Grant novels

Stand-alone mysteries

These novels are set in the same "world"/geography as the Inspector Grant novels.

Other novels

Biography

Plays

Dramatisations

Source: Radio Times Archive

References

  1. ↑ Henderson, Jennifer Morag (2015). A Life: Josephine Tey. Dingwall: Sandstone. pp. 91–93. ISBN 978-1-910985-37-3.
  2. 1 2 3 Butler, Pamela J. "The Mystery of Josephine Tey", Richard III Society, American Branch
  3. ↑ Tey, Josephine. The Daughter of Time. Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 47.
  4. ↑ Hitchens, Peter (1 November 2012). "A Good Read – and an Encounter with Those Wicked Russians". hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk. Retrieved 2 November 2012.
  5. ↑ "About the Author" in Tey, Josephine, The Man in the Queue. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995, p. 255.
  6. 1 2 3 "About the Author" in Tey, Josephine, The Daughter of Time. Touchstone, 1995, pp. 207.
  7. ↑ Henderson, pp. 240-46.

External links

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