Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  However, it’s worth remembering that the Gordon Daviot who wrote ‘His Own Country’ is not yet the Gordon Daviot who was a success on the West End and whose plays were performed across the country. It is as if she has taken her own situation – look how they treat me, my family and friends – and magnified it several times to create fiction. Her description is accurate. Many people have experienced that sort of jealousy, and, in the Highlands, where to succeed almost inevitably involves leaving home, it can be prevalent. However, the story is so relentless in its description that Rawson becomes a less sympathetic character. Younger people – Daviot was thirty-two when she wrote this – don’t always realize that academic and work achievements in themselves are not always as valuable as learning to live with others. University graduates, full of their achievements, return home regularly to irritate those around them, full of ideas on how to change everything and how little towns are full of people who are too stupid to understand the brilliant concepts emanating from the university cities. Rawson does sound rather irritating, as in conversation he

  caught a phrase almost before the judge had dropped it, twisted it, juggled with it, made it into something quite different with a skill that no law court could have bettered; told a story as illustration and mimicked the hero of it with such a faithfulness tinged with burlesque, that, when he had finished, they shouted with laughter, and the ambassador lifted his glass in a little gesture of congratulation.

  He is too good to be true. Daviot is not trying in her story to understand more about the townspeople’s view; she is solely on Rawson’s side. However, whatever its flaws, it is certainly a compelling story. The description of an awkward homecoming is universal enough to appeal to many people, and the passion in it, as well as its well-crafted style, show unmistakable promise.

  The editors of the English Review agreed, as they followed up the publication of ‘His Own Country’ with ‘Deborah’ (in March 1929). This slightly anti-climactic but beautifully evocative ghost story was the longest of Daviot’s short pieces, at almost 3,000 words, showing that she was already turning away from the genre. Intriguingly, the manuscript of ‘Deborah’ has the first indication that Daviot was already considering another pen-name, as it is signed ‘Josephine Tey’.6 However, ‘Gordon Daviot’ was still a name worth keeping, as Daviot was now the published author of a novel. In 1929, four years after the publication of her first poem, and six years after her return to Inverness, Gordon Daviot had not one, but two novels published.

  Gordon Daviot’s first novel was Kif. Several years later she advised a friend on how to get published: ‘did you ever send poems or novels round the publishers – and go on sending them? Or try them on an agent?’7 Beth had no particular connection with any literary agent or publisher, and was published through persistence and talent. Her first agent was Curtis Brown, one of the largest literary and talent agencies in the country, whose clients have included Kenneth Grahame, A. A. Milne, Samuel Beckett and D. H. Lawrence, and her first publisher was Ernest Benn. Kif was published in both the UK and, a year later, in the US, and was widely and positively reviewed. For the daughter of a fruiterer, Beth had broken into an exclusive literary world.

  When her copies of the hardback version of Kif arrived at her house in Crown, Beth inscribed one to her father: ‘Colin MacKintosh / from / Gordon Daviot / 1st February 1929’.8 She wanted her family to share in her success. The printed dedication in the book is a little mysterious, as most of Beth’s dedications were. It read, ‘TO M—— / WHO MIGHT HAVE LIKED IT / OR MIGHT NOT / BUT IN ANY CASE / WOULD HAVE BEEN PLEASED’. I have always thought that, instead of ‘M’ being a name, it stood for ‘Mother’, and was a private dedication to the late Josephine MacKintosh.

  Kif was very definitely an attempt at serious literature. The title character (Kif is a nickname – his real name is Archibald Vicar), is a boy from a farm in Scotland, who joins the army at the outbreak of the Great War. He does well enough in the army, but his story really begins when the war is over, and he returns to London. He has fallen in love with that city, and tries to make his way there, but the harsh post-war conditions – and his own inability to make the right choices – lead him eventually into a life of crime, and the book ends with him on trial, where his crimes are judged serious enough to invoke the death penalty. He has been unable to find love, but the only true women in his life – the sister of his best friend, and an old woman from the farm where he grew up – lament his passing and show the reader that Kif was not completely responsible for his downfall, but only a victim of the times he lived in.

  One of the striking things about the book is that, for a first novel, it is remarkably polished: too often a first novel is thinly disguised autobiography, but Gordon Daviot chose a male protagonist – and one of her strengths as a writer is that her characters always seem alive. They aren’t mouthpieces for Beth’s opinions, but fully formed. Kif’s choices interest Daviot, she writes about his motivations, but he is independent of Daviot, and makes choices she never would. She was a born storyteller and novelist, not writing about her own life, but interested in other people, particularly different characters and what motivates them. It is what gives her detective novels, in particular, such enduring appeal, but it is also one of the contributing factors in making Beth herself such a mystery. To the modern reader, there is an extra layer of both mystery and an understanding of the extra layer of finely crafted writing, as we know that ‘Gordon Daviot’ is the assumed name of a Highland housewife, not a man who could have experienced the war.

  Daviot, however, although not writing autobiographically, always wrote from knowledge and experience. Kif is in many ways an Inverness novel; it is a novel of the 4th Cameron Highlanders. The geography of the novel is the invented geography familiar to Daviot’s short stories, with Kif signing up in ‘Feriton’ to the fictional regiment ‘Carnshires’ – but the Carnshires follow the path of the 4th Camerons throughout the war, and they are led by the admirable ‘Murray Heaton’, a homage to the 4th Camerons’ real leader ‘Murdoch Beaton’. Like the real Beaton, Heaton is loved and respected by his men – and ends the book promoted and married to Ann, a VAD and one of the few sympathetic female characters. The real-life Beaton survived and prospered, going on to have a fascinating career, involving work for the Dewar Report, which foreshadowed the NHS.9 A photograph of Beaton in his army kilt shows a neat, dark man with a tidy moustache: an almost Alan Grant-like figure. Incidents throughout the novel, such as the fight when the Highland regiment reach their training camp at Bedford, echo real life. And, of course, the one Cameron Highlander who is mentioned, Travenna, is perhaps a cameo of Beth’s real-life soldier boyfriend.

  Beth had kept the writing of Kif a secret from many of her friends – her college room-mate ‘Dave’ was surprised when it was published, and Beth wrote apologizing for not discussing it before, explaining that she’d felt it would have been strange to suddenly say ‘I’ve written a book’ before it had been accepted for publication.10 Now it was published, though, Beth was happy to talk about it, and about her next novel, The Man in the Queue.

  The Man in the Queue, Beth explained to Dave, was being held back from publication at her request until Kif’s reviews had a chance to take. In the meantime, Kif was being prepared for the US market. This brought Beth face-to-face with Gordon Daviot for the first time: she had never told her publishers that ‘Daviot’ was a pseudonym, or, indeed, that she was a woman. Benn, the publisher, wrote asking for a biography and photo to put on the back of the US edition of Kif, as was standard American practice. Unsure how to explain herself, and unwilling to supply the biography and photo, Beth took the train down to London and went to see her publisher. The trip was worth it, Beth told Dave, if only to see the look on her publishers’ faces when ‘Gordon Daviot’ was announced at their office and Beth walked into the room! Beth went to Inverness photographer Andrew Paterson to have her portrait taken, but was unhappy with the result.11 She generally disliked having her
photograph taken and was self-deprecating about her appearance. Kif’s author stayed anonymous a little longer.

  In 1929, the First World War still hung over everything. Kif was published around the same time as the classics A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front. Kif was Gordon Daviot’s attempt to make sense of the changes the Great War had wrought – Kif himself sees the war as a series of experiences, not all bad, but he is not able to see the wider picture and see how the war has irrevocably changed both him and the society he lives in. Daviot’s portrayal of post-war London and the struggle for soldiers to find their place and find work is sensitive and well-drawn.

  The cleverness and humour of Josephine Tey’s detective novels is not so apparent in Kif, which has a very serious tone in places, but, although Kif approaches the war directly, The Man in the Queue is also influenced by it. Detective fiction generally shows a deviation from the norm that is then fixed; the moral code of society is challenged but then returned to – a rather post-war attitude, and something that is recognized as being a common thread in Golden Age detective fiction. Beth later made a distinction between her literary writing as ‘Gordon Daviot’ and her mystery novels by ‘Josephine Tey’, but it gives a clearer view of her work to know that The Man in the Queue was first published as being by ‘Gordon Daviot’. Beth was interested in the same themes in her first ‘literary’ and ‘mystery’ novels, they just express them in different ways.

  Kif had been sweated over for months and years. Beth had written it and sent it out repeatedly before it was accepted for publication. The Man in the Queue, published just three months later, in May 1929, had a very different genesis. Detective fiction – the thing Beth is best known for today – was almost an accident. Frustrated by her progress in getting her work published, Beth had been attracted by a competition. She later wrote to a friend that The Man in the Queue ‘wouldn’t have been written at all if Methuen hadn’t offered £250 for a detective novel. Even then I had no intention of writing one but one night an idea struck with such force that it hurt.’12 She sat down at her typewriter and bashed out what became the first Alan Grant novel, completing the manuscript in only two or three weeks. The Man in the Queue is far freer in style than Kif, and far more enjoyable to read. It doesn’t have the ponderous feel of a first novel and its story has stood the test of time (despite some outdated language). In keeping with the lighter tone, the novel is dedicated ‘To Brisena, who actually wrote it’. Brisena was the nickname Beth had given her typewriter. Despite the claim that it was written in only a fortnight, the reason it could be completed in such a short time was that Beth had already dedicated considerable time and effort into writing other long works, and had learnt a lot about structure, storytelling and technique, which she was then able to apply to the framework of a detective novel. This framework was always the best showcase for Beth’s original ideas and style: by taking something familiar to the reader (the detective genre) and adding her own unique spin, she was able to take the reader into her own world, and her own original way of thinking and mix of experiences. Beth told her college friend Marjorie that she thought The Man in the Queue was a much greater achievement than Kif.

  The Man in the Queue was the most successful of Beth’s early novels, and has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1929. Although it was originally published under her pseudonym ‘Gordon Daviot’, it is now published under the name ‘Josephine Tey’. It is generally thought that the Tey name did not appear until the publication of A Shilling for Candles in 1936, but it seems that it may have actually been 1929 when Tey made her first appearance. Orlando, the well respected reference database on women’s writing, literature and cultural history, states that The Man in the Queue was repackaged for the US market later in 1929, and appeared in two editions. “The Man in the Queue” by Gordon Daviot was published by E.P.Dutton of New York, while an abridged version was also published by Mercury under the title “Killer in the Crowd” – and the name Josephine Tey. It was previously thought that Mercury’s abridged edition and alternative title first appeared in 1954, but editions listed in library catalogues and for sale online do appear to exist with the 1929 publication date. When coupled with the ‘Josephine Tey’ name on the manuscript of 1929 story ‘Deborah’, and with the knowledge that it was at this time that Beth revealed to her publisher her real identity, it does seem likely that the Tey name was first considered in 1929, for the American publication of her first mystery. Her US publishers had wanted an author photo and biography for Gordon Daviot, and, when shown the photo of a young woman, they may have suggested that a female pen name would be more acceptable to them.13 Since then, the book has been through numerous editions, with various different publishers and very varied cover art.14 It won a second award, the Dutton Mystery Prize, on its publication in the US, has been adapted for radio and was translated into French not long after its first publication, published by Librarie Plon under another new title as Le Monogramme de Perles in 1932.15

  The 1920s and 30s became known as the Golden Age of crime fiction, an era when the genre was phenomenally popular, and when several masters of the form were writing. The ‘Big Four’ were all writing at this time – the authors whose names have become synonymous with the crime fiction of the era, whose work has stood the test of time, and who are familiar to modern readers: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. Other popular detective fiction published around the time of The Man in the Queue included Georgette Heyer’s detective novels.

  The Man in the Queue was originally written and entered by Beth for a competition run by the publisher Methuen, who presumably wanted to capitalise on the popularity of detective fiction.16 It must have been thrilling for the judges to realize the sheer quality of Gordon Daviot’s entry, and to receive such an assured book from an unknown writer. From the opening chapter of The Man in the Queue, the reader knows they are in safe hands. Chapter 1 describes the queue waiting to get into a theatre performance. The anticipation and build-up is palpable – as readers we can’t wait to get in to the theatre. And then, the build-up leads instead to the amazing discovery of the dead man’s body in the lively queue. It is a perfect opening chapter. Beth’s inspiration came partly from a discussion with a friend who had argued that dying in a solitary place would be horrific – Beth countered with this shocking description of death in public – where everyone should be able to stop it and no one does.17

  Chapter 2 is the first introduction to Inspector Alan Grant, and the reader knows instantly that this is a sympathetic character; this is the hero. Daviot even switches to second person when introducing him: ‘if you can visualize a dapperness that is not of the tailor’s dummy type, then that is Grant.’18 This is not a narrative device that is used in her later books, and it is a stylistic trick that is often associated with less experienced or less confident writers, who feel they cannot let their story stand on its own without giving the reader extra information. However, in this, Daviot’s first mystery novel, it works, inviting the reader into the world of the story. There are some aspects of Grant that don’t seem to fit with the later books in which he is featured (for example, it is hard – though not impossible – to reconcile the idea that he was born in the Midlands, as mentioned here, with Grant returning to the Scotland of his childhood in The Singing Sands) but generally he remains a consistent character. His traits are well formed here, particularly his logical approach to crime solving and interest in people and places. Grant follows the trail of the suspicious character seen arguing in the queue, chasing him round London and up to the Highlands, before the plot twist is revealed at the end.

  Like Kif, The Man in the Queue has moments where its 1920s date is too apparent for the modern reader, particularly when characters talk about ‘Dago’ stereotypes. Indeed, Beth even considered titling the book The Dago at one point, though changed her mind when she found out another book had recently come out with this name.19 However, Grant’s interest in the
character of his villains, rather than judgement on them, is what saves The Man in the Queue from outdated racism. Grant is always prepared to admit that the opposite of what he thinks might be true: it is integral to his crime-solving approach and shows Daviot’s genuine interest in people, a defining characteristic of a good writer. In Kif, too, there is a startlingly large range of characters, drawn without judgement, from Kif himself, to the middle-class friend he makes in the army, to boxers, ‘Pinkie’ the black servant, Scots on the make in London, criminals, betting men, jockeys – it is clear from what she writes about that when Beth moved away from Inverness she went around with her eyes open, seeing the many different cultures in London, for example, and drawing her own conclusions.

  One of the attractions of The Man in the Queue is the action: the section where Grant careers off to the Highlands makes the book like a more sedate Buchan (or a chaste Fleming), and one of its strengths is that Daviot knows all the places she describes. The place names, including Carninnish and Garnie, are fictional, and Grant is travelling across the fictional landscape that Daviot had already laid out in her short stories – but they are clearly based on a real place: the west coast home of her father Colin MacKintosh. Colin visited and kept up links with his home of Shieldaig not only in the 1920s but right up until the 1940s, and Beth must have accompanied him on some of his trips west.20 The geography may be slightly rearranged to suit the story, but when Grant takes the train up from London to Inverness, then transfers onto a railway heading west – ‘a little local affair that for the rest of the morning trundled from the green countryside back into a brown desolation [...] West and still farther west they trailed, stopping inexplicably at stations set down equally inexplicably in the middle of vast moors devoid of human habitation’– that must be the Kyle line.21 The trains are more modern now, but the journey, as you pass through request stop stations like Achnashellach, is still recognizable. The unnamed station Grant gets out at is probably Strathcarron. Even in the 1980s and 90s, you still had to get the postbus from the station down to Loch Carron and on to the other villages, sitting in amongst the German hikers and mailbags, though it wasn’t quite such a rattly old contraption as Grant endures. In the 1920s, there was only one road from Strathcarron to Shieldaig, Beth’s father’s home on the Applecross Peninsula, and it was certainly in the terrible condition that Grant describes. Twisting and turning until it eventually headed north to the coast, it would have taken, with stops to drop off the mail, roughly the thirty-six miles and five hours that Josephine Tey gives to Grant’s journey. Shieldaig is still very isolated, but in the 1920s, when Beth seems to have first made the journey, it really was a trip as epic and basic as she describes in The Man in the Queue.