Elizabeth MacKintosh, aka Mystery Writer Josephine Tey, aka Playwright Gordon Daviot

Elizabeth MacKintosh, pen name Josephine Tey, was born on July 25, 1896, in Inverness, capital of the Scottish Highlands. Her father was recorded on the birth certificate as a fruiterer. “Strange as it may seem, few of us had ever known the real person,” recalled Mairi MacDonald, a contemporary at Inverness Royal Academy. “We had rubbed shoulders with her in our busy streets; admired her pretty home and picturesque garden—and some had even shared schooldays with her—yet no one enjoyed her companionship, for Gordon Daviot was and wished to be what she herself termed herself, ‘a lone wolf,’ discouraging any attempts at fraternization.” 

In school, she was a reluctant pupil, she preferred playing tic-tac-toe with a neighbor in class, or drawing mustaches and spectacles on portraits of the Kings of Scotland, or scampering off to a cloakroom “where, upon an old set of parallel bars—housed there for no apparent reason—she delighted herself and others by turning somersaults.”

Her first career as a physical training instructor was in her opinion the happiest time of her life. This admission is a rare insight into very private life. She never married, and rarely spoke about herself or her life. According to most sources, including an obituary in the London Times, her teaching career was curtailed by family obligations. After teaching physical training at schools in England and Scotland, she returned to Inverness to care for her invalid father. It was there that she began her career as a writer. She never returned to teaching but her experiences there provided the backdrop for Miss Pym Disposes, set at a physical-training college in the English Midlands. 

She did more than create pen names for herself. Writing life was as compartmentalized and well developed as any of her characters. Elizabeth MacKintosh, Gordon Daviot, and Josephine Tey were distinct personae. Even her correspondence has that chameleon quality: a letter from “Gordon” is quite different in tone from a “Mac” letter or a “Tey” letter. Perhaps her reluctance to meet people stemmed from a need to keep all three of her identities in their individual compartments, a task much easier on paper than in person.

It is no wonder Josephine Tey never belonged to the Detection Club. The social nature of the group would have been difficult for her. She also had no desire to pledge herself to the constraints of the oath they swore. Unlike Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey ignored golden-age British crime fiction rules. The results were brilliant.  During her career as a crime novelist, from The Man in the Queue (1929) to The Singing Sands (published posthumously in 1952), she broke almost all the commandments. 

Her disdain for formulaic fiction is confirmed in the opening chapter of The Daughter of Time (1951). Detective Inspector Alan Grant despairs the books on his bedside table while in the hospital recuperating from a broken leg, among them a writing-by-numbers mystery called "The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener." “Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then?” he wonders despairingly.

Her work may have fallen out of favor during the Golden Age of detective fiction, but it stands the test of time. With strong, well-developed characters, and nimble, witty prose, it is well worth revisiting her work.