Josephine Tey

Scottish · 1896 to 1952

Born Elizabeth MacKintosh on July 25, 1896, in Inverness, Scotland, the eldest of three daughters of a Highland fruiterer and his wife, she attended the Inverness Royal Academy and in 1914 left for the Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham. She taught physical education at schools in England and Scotland through the war years, nursed in Inverness during her vacations, and lost a soldier sweetheart on the Somme, a wound the historical record never quite closed. In 1923 her mother died and she returned to Inverness to keep house for her widowed father, a duty that lasted the rest of her life. She began publishing verse and stories in the Westminster Gazette under the pen name Gordon Daviot, then in 1929 issued her first detective novel, The Man in the Queue, which introduced Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard and won the Dutton Mystery Prize in America. Her 1932 play Richard of Bordeaux, mounted under the same male pseudonym at the New Theatre with John Gielgud in the title role, ran for over a year and made his name and hers. As Josephine Tey she wrote a further sequence of eight novels, austere, witty, and quietly subversive, including The Franchise Affair (1948), Brat Farrar (1949), and The Daughter of Time (1951), in which the bedridden Grant uses a portrait of Richard III to clear that king of the murder of his nephews in the Tower. The Crime Writers Association named it in 1990 the finest crime novel ever written. She died of liver cancer on February 13, 1952, in London, at fifty-five, leaving her estate to the National Trust.