She was born in Inverness, Scotland, and attended a physical training college in Birmingham, England, before becoming a teacher. However, her literary career began only when she was forced to give up regular work in order to care for her invalid father.
In six of the mystery novels she wrote under the name of Josephine Tey, the hero was Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant; the most famous of them is The Daughter of Time, in which Grant, laid up in the hospital, has friends research reference books so he can puzzle out the mystery of whether King Richard III of England murdered his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. It was the last book she published, shortly before her death.
As Gordon Daviot she wrote about a dozen one-act plays and another dozen full-length plays, but only four of them were produced during her lifetime. She also wrote a biography and three novels that were not mysteries.
Mystery novels by Tey
Brat Farrar [or Come and Kill Me] (1949)
The Daughter of Time (1951)
The Franchise Affair (1948)
The Man in the Queue [or Killer in the Crowd] (1929)
Miss Pym Disposes (1946)
A Shilling for Candles (1936) (the basis of Hitchcock's 1937 movie Young and Innocent)
The Singing Sands (1952)
To Love and Be Wise (1950)
External Resource
Detective Fiction Resource Site (http://www.classiccrimefiction.com)
Though she was best known as a playwright, she continued at intervals to publish novels and short stories, and under the pen-name "JosephineTey," wrote a number of detective stories in which a distinctive quality, usually historical, enhanced the ingenuity which is the main attraction of this kind of fiction.
"JosephineTey" is derived from her mother's first name and the Tey surname of a distant grandmother in England.
Tey keeps the pace lively by the constant activities of contemporary characters, while Grant's "flashbacks" to the past through the reading of historical sources guides the reader stepwise through the collection of evidence, such as it is, and the reasoning process.
And human emotions, which JosephineTey understood as well as anyone, do not change over time, which means that THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR remains as compelling a psychological study as it had been when she wrote it in the 1940s.
JosephineTey is remarkable for the broad subject range of her books and for fine writing.
JosephineTey's 1949 THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR is frequently described as a mystery or a detective novel.
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