Josephine Tey Books in Order

Josephine Tey was the pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh, born on 25 July 1896 in Inverness in the north of Scotland. The eldest of three daughters of a fruiterer and a former schoolteacher, she grew up in Inverness and went to the local academy before training as a physical education teacher.

She studied at Anstey Physical Training College near Birmingham during the First World War, then spent several years teaching in schools across England and Scotland. In her holidays she worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in a convalescent home, and a wartime romance ended when the man she loved was killed on the Somme. The discipline, injuries and small dramas of gym life later fed directly into the world she created in Miss Pym Disposes.

In the early 1920s MacKintosh returned permanently to Inverness to care for her widowed father. While keeping house she began to publish poems and short stories under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, and soon moved on to novels and plays. Her first novel, Kif: An Unvarnished History, followed a working‑class boy through the trenches of the First World War and was well received, but it was the theatre that first brought her wider notice.

Writing as Gordon Daviot, she scored a major hit with the historical play Richard of Bordeaux, a fresh, intimate portrait of Richard II that ran for more than a year in London and made its star, John Gielgud, a household name. Other plays followed, along with a biography, Claverhouse, which set out to rescue the reputation of the controversial Jacobite soldier John Graham of Dundee.

Her crime fiction, written as Josephine Tey, grew alongside this theatrical work. The Man in the Queue (1929) introduced Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant, a quiet, sharp‑eyed professional who cares as much about character and motive as about alibis. Over six novels Grant moves through West End theatres, seaside cliffs, country houses and even a hospital bed, bringing a thoughtful, questioning mind to each case.

Tey also wrote stand‑alone mysteries that many readers return to just as often as the Grant books. Brat Farrar is a tense, compassionate story about an impostor who comes to care for the family he is meant to deceive. Miss Pym Disposes turns a girls’ training college into the setting for a slow‑burn moral crisis. The Franchise Affair and To Love and Be Wise use small‑town gossip, tabloid outrage and bohemian village life to explore how reputations are built and broken.

Her most famous novel, The Daughter of Time, sends the bedridden Grant back into the past to re‑examine whether Richard III really murdered the Princes in the Tower. Mixing police procedure with archival detective work, it reshaped popular views of Richard and was later voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers’ Association. Her final Grant story, The Singing Sands, published after her death, follows a fragile, exhausted detective on leave in the Scottish Highlands, chasing the meaning of a half‑finished poem.

Away from the page MacKintosh was intensely private. She avoided publicity, guarded her personal life and preferred her pseudonyms to stand between herself and the literary world. In her final year she knew she was seriously ill but told almost no one, continuing to write until she could not. She died in London on 13 February 1952, aged fifty‑five.

In her will she left the royalties from her books to the National Trust, a quiet gesture that still echoes every time a new reader discovers her work. Today her novels are cherished for their clean prose, psychological insight and sideways approach to crime, bridging the gap between classic Golden Age puzzles and the more character‑driven mysteries that followed.