Josephine Tey

(from 2018)

In 1990 the British Crime Writers’ Association produced a list of the top 100 crime novels of all time. Obviously this was very subjective, and maybe the list would change considerably if revisited today. But top of the list, in their view the best crime novel of all time was one written by Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time. Tey weighed in again at number 11 with The Franchise Affair. A sub-section The Whodunnit placed The Franchise Affair at number 1. And another sub-section, Romantic Suspense, had another Tey offering, Brat Farrar, at number 8.

Quite an achievement for someone who viewed her detective novels as “her knitting,” a hobby for when she was not concentrating on her real work as a dramatist under the masculine name of Gordon Daviot.

There have been several TV dramatizations of her work and at least three films – Hitchcock adapted A Shilling for Candles as Young and Innocent (1937), The Franchise Affair came out as that title in 1951 and Brat Farrar was given the Hammer horror film treatment as Paranoiac in 1963 (but wisely leaving her name off the credits).

But it is her command of language and dialog that makes the books special for me.

There was a biography finally produced for her in 2015 by Jennifer Morag Henderson. Going off onto one of my usual hobby-horses and tangents, the book could have done with some pruning. Inside 500 odd pages was a useful 200 pages struggling to get out. And as someone who has been proof reader for a number of writers over the years, it could have done with more work. You can get away with spelling to some degree today, because modern computers have spell-checks, and grammar and syntax can be very individual. If James Joyce can write Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy in Ulysses with virtually no punctuation, who are we to argue – other than mutter something rude about pretentiousness…  But a proof reader’s art is to spot where a writer defines things they’ve already explained in detail but forgotten. Or where the writer assumes they have covered something and in the final incarnation they haven’t, presenting you with a jigsaw with missing pieces.  A proof reader has to read the complete product from start to finish if they are to spot these problems. Well, the biographer of Tey could have done with a bit more of that. 

However, very much on the positive side, the book did solve several questions about her life. She was born Elizabeth MacKintosh in Scotland and as a young adult went into nursing and teaching, qualifying as a physiotherapist and PE teacher. But she had to give up her career in England to go back to Inverness to nurse her mother until she died, and then spent nearly 30 years caring for her father. As soon as she got her freedom after he died she was struck down with cancer and died within fifteen months herself. But over the decades, she got away to London on the railway twice a year by employing a temporary housekeeper and under the pen-name Gordon Daviot had a huge hit in 1932 with an historical play on the West End stage (Richard of Bordeaux) that made the career of John Gielgud. Three volumes of her collected plays were published after her death.

But then under the pen-name Josephine Tey she wrote a series of detective novels, especially after the Second World War, including the three mentioned at the start of this article. The number one winner of the best crime novel Daughter of Time has her main policeman stuck in a hospital bed totally bored out of his skull, who then starts researching the murder of the Princes in the Tower (c. 1483). Tey, through her detective, “proves” that the usual suspect Richard III was not guilty! The same plot device, detective in hospital solves ancient case, was reused by Colin Dexter with Inspector Morse and The Wench is Dead. Tey died aged 55 and could have written many more classics had she lived.

The biography dispels a myth about her last days. The usual story is that, knowing she was mortally ill, she came to London for one last time. She stayed at her club. She contacted no-one. What did she do? Where did she go? When her death was announced in the newspapers it caught the theater world by surprise.

In fact, the truth was far more mundane. She took a trip south to have an operation in a London hospital. While staying at her “club” sounds a little esoteric, it was an accommodation address for nurses, sharing premises with The Royal College of Nursing, for which she qualified from work during the First World War. The operation showed her to be in the terminal stages of cancer. She went back to her sister’s home in London, where the family nursed her for a short time until she died. That she’d planned to go straight back to Scotland after the operation is indicated by the fact that the water pipes in her home in Inverness all froze up without attention, and when the family eventually made the trip after her death, water had been pouring out of her home for some time and the neighbours apparently didn’t have a contact number. Much in the house was ruined, but fortunately not the manuscript for her last novel The Singing Sands, which was published posthumously. But the other tale with its hints of mystery in the midst of tragedy sounds better. As one of the last lines in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Because she was such a private person who never married there was an aura of mystery about her. A modern novelist has used her as a character in a detective series of her own, and portrays Tey as a lesbian. In reality, correspondence shows Tey rebuffing advances from a famous actress, and like so many she lost a boyfriend in the First World War, and her second love, a poet, died in the 1920s. History created a dearth of men for the 1920s and her situation was by no means unique.

So what was she really like? Half the fun of reading her books today is looking for clues, although different readers will interpret differently. I believe she saw herself as Marion Kane in the Franchise Affair (loosely based on the 1753 Elizabeth Canning case). Her waspish portrayal in the same novel of a predatory teenage girl probably came from her experience as a teacher. Her dialog of theatrical poseurs probably comes from her contacts in the 1930s London theatre world and shows off her skill as a dramatist – which as noted above she believed to be her first calling. But her plays are long out of print and unperformed; whereas all her detective novels have remained consistently available.

What the biography has done is send me back to the original books. One of my favourites, based on the phoniness of the London theatre world of the 1930s and 40s with a bit of cross-dressing thrown in for good measure, is To Love and Be Wise. I think I’ll start again with that.