Elizabeth MacKintosh
BornElizabeth MacKintosh
(1896-07-25)25 July 1896
Inverness, Scotland
Died13 February 1952(1952-02-13) (aged 55)
London, England
Pen nameJosephine Tey,
Gordon Daviot
NationalityScottish
EducationInverness Royal Academy,
Anstey Physical Training College
Genresplays, novels

Elizabeth MacKintosh (25 July 1896 – 13 February 1952), known by the pen name Josephine Tey, was a Scottish author. Her novel The Daughter of Time, a detective work investigating the death of the Princes in the Tower, was chosen by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time.[1] Her first play Richard of Bordeaux, written under another pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, starred John Gielgud in its successful West End run.

Life and work

MacKintosh was born in Inverness, the oldest of three daughters of Colin MacKintosh, a fruiterer, and Josephine (née Horne). She attended Inverness Royal Academy and then, in 1914, Anstey Physical Training College in Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham.[2] She taught physical training at various schools in England and Scotland and during her vacations worked at a convalescent home in Inverness as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. A youthful romance ended with her soldier friend's death in the Somme battles.[3] In 1923, she returned to Inverness permanently to care for her invalid mother, and stayed after her mother's death that year to keep house for her father.[4]

The curriculum for "physical training" included much more than athletics. Tey used her school experience in Miss Pym Disposes when describing the subjects taught at the school, and the types of bruises and other injuries sustained by the pupils. When she graduated, Tey worked in a physiotherapy clinic in Leeds, then taught in schools, first in Nottinghamshire, then in Oban, where she was injured when a boom in the gymnasium fell on her face. Tey repurposed this incident as a method of murder in Miss Pym Disposes.

While caring for her father she began her career as a writer.[5] Her first published work was in The Westminster Gazette in 1925, under the name Gordon Daviot. She continued publishing verse and short stories in The Westminster Review, The Glasgow Herald and the Literary Review.

Her first novel, Kif: An Unvarnished History, was well received at the time with good reviews, a sale to America, and a mention in The Observer's list of Books of the Week. This work, inspired by a detachment of the 4th Cameron Highlanders, a Scottish Territorial battalion stationed at Inverness before the First World War and prominent in the city's affairs, was an early indication of Tey's lasting interest in military matters.[6] Three months later, her first mystery novel, The Man in the Queue, was published by Benn, Methuen. It was awarded the Dutton Mystery Prize when published in America. This is the first appearance of her detective, Inspector Alan Grant. It would be some years before she wrote another mystery.

MacKintosh's real ambition had been to write a play which would receive a run in London's West End. Her play Richard of Bordeaux was produced in 1932 at the Arts Theatre, under the Daviot pseudonym. Its success was such that it transferred to the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward Theatre) in 1933, for a year-long run.[2] The production made a household name of its young leading man and director, John Gielgud (who became MacKintosh's life-long friend).[7] (Tey writes of Inspector Alan Grant that "he had in his youth seen Richard of Bordeaux; four times he had seen it".)[8] She stated she was inspired by Gielgud's performance in Hamlet and by the Royal Tournament.[9] Two more of her plays were produced at the New Theatre, The Laughing Woman (1934) and Queen of Scots (1934, written in collaboration with Gielgud).[7]

She wrote about a dozen one-act plays and another dozen full-length plays, many with biblical or historical themes, under the name of Gordon Daviot but none of these received notable success.[2] 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.[5] Only four of her plays were produced during her lifetime.

Her only non-fiction book, Claverhouse, was written as a vindication of John Graham, 1st Viscount Dundee, whom she regarded as a libeled hero: "It is strange that a man whose life was so simple in pattern and so forthright in spirit should have become a peg for every legend, bloody or brave, that belonged to his time."

MacKintosh's best-known books were written under the name of Josephine Tey, which was the name of her Suffolk great-great grandmother.

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 best known 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.

The Franchise Affair also has an 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. Her last work, a further crime novel, The Singing Sands, was found in her papers and published posthumously.

Death

Tey was intensely private, shunning all publicity throughout her life.[10] During her last year, when she knew that she was terminally 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 privateer Henry Morgan. She died of liver cancer at her sister Mary's home in London on 13 February 1952.[10] Most of her friends, including Gielgud, were unaware that she was even ill.[11] Her obituary in The Times appeared under her real name: "Miss E. Mackintosh Author of 'Richard of Bordeaux'".[2]

Proceeds from Tey's estate, including royalties from her books, were assigned to the National Trust.[10]

Reception and legacy

In 1990, The Daughter of Time was selected by the Crime Writers' Association as the greatest crime novel of all time; The Franchise Affair was 11th on the same list of 100 books.[1]

In 2015, Val McDermid argued that Tey "cracked open the door" for later writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell to explore the darker side of humanity, creating a bridge between the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and contemporary crime novels, because "Tey opened up the possibility of unconventional secrets. Homosexual desire, cross-dressing, sexual perversion – they were all hinted at, glimpsed in the shadows as a door closed or a curtain twitched. Tey was never vulgar nor titillating.... Nevertheless, her world revealed a different set of psychological motivations."[12] In 2019, Evie Jeffrey discussed Tey's engagement with capital punishment debates in A Shilling for Candles and To Love and Be Wise.[13]

Publications

Novels

Inspector Alan Grant novels

All as Josephine Tey except where specified

  1. The Man in the Queue (also published as Killer in the Crowd) (1929) [as Gordon Daviot]. Serialised, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 12 August to 24 September 1930.[14]
  2. A Shilling for Candles (1936)[15] (the basis of Hitchcock's 1937 film Young and Innocent)
  3. The Franchise Affair (1948) [Inspector Grant appears briefly at the beginning, mentioned a few times] (filmed in 1950 starring Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray)
  4. To Love and Be Wise (1950)
  5. The Daughter of Time (1951)
  6. The Singing Sands (1952)

Stand-alone mysteries

All as Josephine Tey. These novels are set in the same fictional 20th-century Britain as the Inspector Grant novels.

Other novels

All as Gordon Daviot

Biography

Stage plays

All as Gordon Daviot except where specified

Radio plays

All as Gordon Daviot

Television plays

All as Gordon Daviot

Short stories

All as Gordon Daviot

Poems

All as Gordon Daviot

Short non-fiction

All as Gordon Daviot

Radio and television dramatisations

References

  1. ^ a b "Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time - UK Crime Writers' Association". Library Thing. Retrieved 6 November 2023.
  2. ^ a b c d "Miss E. Mackintosh Author of "Richard of Bordeaux"". The Times. No. 52236. 15 February 1952. p. 8.
  3. ^ Fraser, Antonia Introduction p.vii 2001 Folio Society edition The Franchise Affair
  4. ^ Henderson, Jennifer Morag (2015). A Life: Josephine Tey. Dingwall: Sandstone. pp. 91–93. ISBN 978-1-910985-37-3.
  5. ^ a b Butler, Pamela J. "The Mystery of Josephine Tey" Archived 15 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Richard III Society, American Branch
  6. ^ Henderson, Jennifer Morag (2016). "War, and First Year at Anstey". Josephine Tey : a Life. Dingwall, Scotland: Sandstone Press Ltd. ISBN 9781910124710.
  7. ^ a b "MacKintosh, Elizabeth [pseuds. Josephine Tey, Gordon Daviot]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37714. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  8. ^ Tey, Josephine. The Daughter of Time. Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 47.
  9. ^ Mann, Jessica (1981). "Josephine Tey". Deadlier than the male : why are respectable English women so good at murder?. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 9780025794603.
  10. ^ a b c McCrum, Robert (30 July 2011). "Elizabeth Mackintosh: woman of mystery who deserves to be rediscovered". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 October 2017.
  11. ^ Ewan, Elizabeth; et al., eds. (2006). The biographical dictionary of Scottish women : from the earliest times to 2004. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p. 233. ISBN 9780748626601.
  12. ^ McDermid, Val (16 July 2015). "Val McDermid: the brillliant unconventional crime novels of Josephine Tey". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  13. ^ Jeffrey, Evie (2019). "Capital Punishment and Women in the British Police Procedural: Josephine Tey's A Shilling for Candles and To Love and Be Wise". Clues: A Journal of Detection. 37 (2): 40–50.
  14. ^ "About the Author" in Tey, Josephine, The Man in the Queue. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995, p. 255.
  15. ^ a b c "About the Author" in Tey, Josephine, The Daughter of Time. Touchstone, 1995, pp. 207.
  16. ^ Henderson, pp. 240-46.
  17. ^ The Stage, 25 April 1963, p. 14
  18. ^ The Scotsman, 8 February 1949
  19. ^ Daviot, Gordon. "Barnharrow". The Faded Page. Peter Davies. Retrieved 17 March 2020.

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