Josephine Tey

• Born: June 25, 1896 or 1897
• Birthplace: Inverness, Scotland
• Died: February 13, 1952
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Police procedural; cozy

Principal Series: Alan Grant, 1929-1952

Contribution

Although Alan Grant is a recurring character in Josephine Tey’s detective novels, he is not always the main character. As in To Love and Be Wise (1950), he may be introduced at the beginning of a novel but not figure prominently until a crime has been committed. In The Franchise Affair (1948), he plays only a minor role. Tey is exceptional in not following the conventional plots of mystery and detective stories. She is more interested in human character. Grant is important insofar as he comes into contact with murder victims and suspects, but usually the human scene is fully described before Grant appears. Consequently, Tey’s novels never seem driven by a mere “ whodunit” psychology. She is interested, rather, in human psychology as it is revealed in the commission of a crime, a disappearance, or a case of imposture. Often readers who do not like the conventions of detective stories like Tey because her novels seem organic; that is, they grow out of what is revealed about the characters. If Tey writes mysteries, it is because human character is a mystery.

Biography

Josephine Tey was born Elizabeth Mackintosh in Inverness, Scotland, where she attended the Royal Academy and studied the humanities. After she was graduated, she continued course work in physical culture at the Anstey Physical College and taught the subject for several years in English schools. She gave up teaching in 1926 to look after her invalid father at their family home. As Gordon Daviot, she wrote novels, short stories, and plays. Her greatest success in the theater came with the production of Richard of Bordeaux (pr. 1932), based on the life of Richard III and starring John Gielgud.

In private life, Tey seemed to have few interests besides horse racing and fishing, both of which figure in her fiction. In a letter to a fellow mystery writer, she confessed that she did not read many mysteries. She was a very shy woman with few close friends. She granted no press interviews. It was characteristic of her to have lived with her fatal illness for a year before her death without telling anyone about it. She never married. The strongest women in her fiction are single, and her detective, Alan Grant, is a bachelor who shares many of his creator’s interests, including a devotion to the theater.

Analysis

Josephine Tey’s first detective novel, The Man in the Queue (1929), introduced Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. Grant is a man with considerable style. As later novels indicate, he is regarded as somewhat suspect at the Yard because of his “flair.” He might be just a bit too intelligent. His superiors fear that his wit may cause him to be too ingenious, to make too much of certain evidence with his fancy interpretations. Indeed, in The Man in the Queue, Grant’s brilliance almost does lead him to the wrong conclusion. Some reviewers thought that Tey spent too much time conveying the mental processes of her detective. A greater fault of her first detective novel, however, is the stabbing of the man in the queue—which is done in public in a crowded line of people. Reviewers wondered why the man did not cry out. None of Tey’s subsequent detective novels depends on gimmickry, however, and with the exception of The Daughter of Time (1951), Grant’s thoughts are not the focus of the narrative.

The Man in the Queue also introduced Grant’s sidekick, Sergeant Williams. As in the classic detective story, Williams plays a kind of Dr. Watson to Grant’s Sherlock Holmes. Grant, however, is much more appreciative of Williams, his detail man, than Holmes is of Watson. Grant relies on Williams for meticulous investigations and often goes over the details to be sure that he (Grant) has not missed anything. In other words, Williams is no mere sounding board, even if he worships Grant as his hero.

Brat Farrar

Except for A Shilling for Candles (1936), Tey wrote no Alan Grant novels in the 1930’s, as though to prevent him from dominating her fiction. Brat Farrar (1949) is about an impostor who claims to be the heir to a huge family fortune. The heir is presumed to have committed suicide as a young boy, although the boy’s body was never found. In a riveting narrative, Tey achieves the astonishing feat of getting readers to identify with the impostor, Brat Farrar, while deepening the mystery of how the heir actually met his death. As in several other novels, she raises intriguing questions about human identity, about how human beings take on roles that can both obscure and reveal reality.

To Love and Be Wise

Similarly, in To Love and Be Wise, an Alan Grant novel, the question at first seems to be what happened to Leslie Searle, an American photographer who has befriended an English family. He disappears on an outing with Walter Whitmore, an English radio personality who is suspected of doing away with Searle because of Searle’s involvement with Whitmore’s fiancée. By the time Grant becomes deeply involved in the case, the novel is half over and the reader’s interest is increasingly focused on exactly who Leslie Searle was. How is it that he insinuated himself into the lives of an English family? What was there about him that made him so appealing? Grant has to pursue these questions before finally realizing that Leslie Searle is not the victim but the perpetrator of a crime.

The Daughter of Time

The most celebrated Alan Grant novel is The Daughter of Time. Grant is laid up with an injury in the hospital. He asks his close friend, the actress Martha Hallard (another regular character in the Grant series), to bring him a set of prints. Among other things, Hallard supplies him with a print of the portrait of Richard III that is on display at the National Gallery in London. Grant is stunned that Richard’s keenly intelligent and compassionate face is nothing like the villain portrayed by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More. With the assistance of an American student, Grant engages in a full-scale research project to exonerate Richard III from the charge of murdering the princes in the Tower and of being the most villainous king in English history.

The Daughter of Time has been extravagantly praised as a tour de force, a unique combination of the detective story and a work of history. It has also been disdained as a prejudiced book that libels historians for supposedly blackening Richard’s name based on insufficient or biased evidence. It is true that Tey does not offer all the evidence that has been used to confirm Richard’s guilt. Worse, the novel has internal flaws. For a novelist who was usually so perceptive about human character, Tey saw only the bright side of Richard’s public character and did not make allowances for the brutal age in which he lived, an age in which struggles for the throne often led to bloodshed. In Tey’s favor, however, the conventions of the mystery and detective genre may also be held accountable: The form mandates that a criminal be caught. If Richard III is not the villain, then Henry VII must be. Tey’s detective amasses a case against Richard’s successor. Historians have other options and have conducted much closer studies of Richard III’s England than can be permitted in a detective novel. Most readers have found The Daughter of Time to be an invigorating work of fiction, particularly appealing for the unusual interpretation of historical events, whatever credence one gives to that interpretation.

The real strength of The Daughter of Time lies in Tey’s emphasis on Grant as an interpreter of the evidence. Although he attacks historians, his methods are not out of line with what R. G. Collingwood has recommended in The Idea of History (1946). In fact, Collingwood invents a detective story to explain how a historian interprets evidence. Even if Grant makes the wrong judgments of history, the important thing is that he is not content to look at secondary sources—that is, other histories of Richard III. Instead, he consults the records and documents produced during Richard’s brief reign. Grant tries to use his experience as a detective, his ability to read human faces, to interpret Richard’s life and work. Grant asks hard questions. He actively investigates the historical evidence and does not rely on authorities. Tey shrewdly gets readers to identify with Grant by having him slowly discover the evidence and then put it to the test of his formidable skepticism.

The Singing Sands

The Daughter of Time is different from the other Grant novels in that Grant displays more confidence than he does elsewhere. In the other novels he has definite mental and physical weaknesses. Something in the English climate makes him sniffle. In The Singing Sands (1952), he retreats to the Scottish highlands to steady himself; in pursuit of a murderer, he is also on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Yet is it his very vulnerability that helps him to identify with others and to see his way through to the solution of his cases.

Much of the beauty of Tey’s writing derives from her love of the English and Scottish countryside. When things go awry in this charming, family-oriented world, it is absolutely imperative that the detective restore equilibrium. The scenes in The Singing Sands of Grant fishing in Highland streams remain vivid long after the plot of the novel is forgotten. In Brat Farrar, which is not part of the Grant series, Tey makes an impostor her main character and makes his identification with an English family and its home such a powerful theme that it becomes imperative that the criminal somehow be able to redeem himself—which he does by discovering the real murderer of the twin whom he has impersonated.

One of the common pitfalls of serial detective fiction is that it can become routinized and thus predictable, the detective employing the same set of gestures and methods that have proved effective and popular in previous novels. This is never so with Tey. Each case confronting Grant is unique, and he must fumble to discover the appropriate technique. Circumstances always influence the way Grant handles a case. In spite of his prodigious mental gifts, he is not presented as a Great Detective who is the equal of every mystery. He profits from lucky accidents, from the suggestions of others, and from the mistakes of criminals. As a result, the reader’s interest is drawn to Grant’s character as well as the mysteries he is trying to solve.

It is striking what a clean, highly individualized world Tey presents in her detective fiction. There are relatively few murders and gruesome incidents. The police and the other institutions of society are never seen as corrupt. Rather, it is human character that is crooked or degenerate. In other words, Tey’s crimes become moral but never sociological problems. She is a keen observer of society but shies away from generalizations about class and economic structure.

Miss Pym Disposes

Given a sufficient interest in crime, an amateur can become a detective. Such is the case in Miss Pym Disposes (1946). Set in a physical education college, this novel draws on Tey’s own experience. Miss Lucy Pym is a best-selling author. She has also been a schoolmistress and now finds herself teaching temporarily at a girls’ school. When she prevents a girl from cheating on an exam, she is compulsively drawn into a murder and devises an extralegal punishment for the criminal that leads to disaster. The novel is a brilliant attack on the high-and-mighty detectives who dispense their own brand of justice and are contemptuous of the police. Given the destructive way Miss Pym disposes of her case, it is no wonder that Tey did not follow this very popular novel with a sequel. Tey rejected the notion that a detective can solve case after case neatly and efficiently. As a result, she only wrote eight mystery and detective novels; each one had to be unique, and each successive novel was as carefully devised as the previous one.

During Tey’s lifetime, two of her works (A Shilling for Candles, The Franchise Affair) were turned into films. The former served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent (1937). Brat Farrar, however, was the subject of two adaptations, first as a television movie for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and then as part of the network’s perennially popular Mystery! series.

Though Tey died in the mid-twentieth century, her works were still in print at the turn of the century. Her crowning achievement, The Daughter of Time, which had been recorded for posterity by Derek Jacobi, had been digitally remastered and released in late 2000. Few mystery writers, past or present, have written with such diversity or originality; Tey’s small body of work has more than withstood the test of time.

Principal Series Characters:

• Alan Grant , a Scotland Yard police detective, is a shrewd reader of human faces who relies on his “flair,” an ingenious, intuitive knack for solving cases. Although he makes mistakes, his intelligence sets him apart from most fictional police detectives, who lack his imagination, initiative, and cosmopolitan outlook.
• Sergeant Williams , Grant’s sidekick, furnishes Grant with detailed information gleaned from his meticulous investigations.

Bibliography

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Tey is compared to such other novelists as Patricia Highsmith and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Analyzes Tey’s use of setting in A Shilling for Candles and The Singing Sands. Bibliographic references and index.

Keen, Suzanne. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Tey is compared with a variety of other writers, from H. P. Lovecraft and Henry James to Umberto Eco and Edmund Spenser. The point of comparison is each author’s representation of the archive and the function of those representations both within and without the text.

Kelly, R. Gordon. “Josephine Tey and Others: The Case of Richard III.” In The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, edited by Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Analyzes the use to which Tey and others put history and the ways in which they represent history while exploring and exploiting the life of King Richard III.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an essay on the life and works of Tey.

Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-one American and British Authors, 1900-2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Examines the life and work of major female mystery writers, including Tey.

Roy, Sandra. Josephine Tey. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Biography of Tey combined with literary analysis of her works.

Talburt, Nancy Ellen. Ten Women of Mystery, edited by Earl F. Bargainner. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. Compares Tey to nine other famous female mystery writers.