Perhaps the biggest mystery of Josephine Tey is who she was. A very private woman, little is known of her life, much of which was spent acting as her father hostess/housekeeper at the family home in Inverness, where she was raised.
Born Elizabeth Mackintosh in 1896, she first attended the Inverness Royal Academy and then trained in gymnastics at the Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham. She became a physical education instructor. At thirty, her mother became ill and she returned to Inverness to manage her father's house. She remained there for the rest of her life.
Little is known about her intimate life, and although it has been suggested that she lost someone during World War I, she never married. As Val McDermid wrote,
The First World War was at its height, and there are hints that Tey suffered a tragic loss during that conflict, though no details survive. Besides, it would be hard to find anyone in Britain untouched by grief in those four years. But she was far from home, and it may well be that the roots of her self-containment were planted then.
Under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, she wrote a highly successful play about Richard II, Richard of Bordeaux, that was produced for the West End and starred John Geilgud, who became a lifelong friend. Although she wrote other plays, none of them achieved the hit status of her first.
And so she returned to writing mysteries, under the name of Josephine Tey. A look at her most famous is below the fold.
The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey
Published by Touchstone
November 29th 1995 (first published 1951)
206 pages
Writing about The Daughter of Time, which was voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers of America in 1990, Robert McCrum of the Guardian states:
The Daughter of Time is possibly her masterpiece. Alan Grant, trapped in hospital with a broken leg, clamours for distraction. His actress friend Marta Hallard, knowing that he fancies himself an expert on faces, gives him some portraits to study. In the face of Richard III, Grant finds power and suffering, the expression of a man of conscience and integrity. Is this "a judge, a soldier, a prince"? he asks. "Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. A worrier, perhaps a perfectionist…"
When Grant discovers that this is the face of one of English history's greatest villains, he is aghast at his misjudgment and sets to uncover the "historical truth" about Richard of Gloucester. He concludes, persuasively, that Richard was wholly innocent of the deaths of the princes in the Tower.
It wasn't a hard sell in my case, long a believer that Richard III had been maligned, but my awakening came from another writer, Sharon Kay Penman, whose work,
The Sunne in Splendour, presents a very human Richard and led to my own research on his case. And while I reached the same conclusion as Inspector Grant, my journey wasn't quite the delight that Tey offers. Nor was Penman's work anywhere near the fun of Tey's.
The real joy of this mystery is how effectively Tey uses the only tools Grant had on hand, his intellect. There was no scene of the crime to investigate, no forensic evidence or any living eye witnesses. There is only a portrait of Richard III and books and logic. Easy to understand how it achieved its acclaim.
Also remarkable is how fresh this work felt. Not at all as dated as I expected to find from a novel written in 1950, the prose is a treat that feels timeless (with the possible exception of being laid up in a hospital for any length of time today). The opening paragraphs:
Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed around a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity.
If you haven't yet explored, Josephine Tey, now might be a good time. Derek Jacobi narrated
The Daughter of Time in the audible version and did a wonderful job.
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