Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  The west coast settings owe something to Tey’s family knowledge of the area and her Gaelic heritage. The American characters, too, could come from family knowledge – it would be an unusual Scottish family that did not have some American relatives, and Tey was no exception, since one of her cousins had emigrated to America.14 Tey also had more and more dealings with America through her work, both publications and adaptations. Tey uses some of her own pet names throughout (like the newspaper name The Clarion) locating it all in Daviot/Tey country, but in reality the island of Cladda is more difficult to locate. There are ‘singing sands’ on Eigg and Islay, both of which are accessible from Oban, where Grant sails from, but Grant flies back, and the plane takes off from the sands, which sounds more like Barra. The description of the aeroplane is very realistic – as is the interest in flying shown throughout the novel – and suggests Beth had experience of flying. She had the money to fly, and flights from Inverness to the Western Isles (including Islay and Barra – but not Eigg, which had to be reached by boat) had been available through Captain Ted Fresson’s Highland Airways since the 1930s. Highland Airways was nationalized after the Second World War, but existed in one form or another until fairly recently, and the small planes it employed flew the mail, newspapers and passengers out to the islands in an experience not dissimilar from Grant’s summation of it.15

  Grant is pleased to be able to fly back from Cladda, as it is another sign that he is recovering from his claustrophobia and work-induced stress and breakdown. The description of his illness is an extremely sympathetic portrait of what it is like to suffer from mental illness, and Grant is in no way diminished by admitting that he is having problems. He appears here as more vulnerable than the usual Golden Age detective, and this, too, makes the book seem modern. Grant first appeared in 1929, during the Golden Age of crime fiction, but Tey continued to develop his character, making Grant, and Tey’s books, a bridge between the classic crime of Agatha Christie, with its emphasis on plot, and the darker, more character-driven crime novels of later writers.16 Tey had personal experience of illness through her nursing of Colin in his final years, but it is heartbreaking to remember that Tey herself, suffering from terminal cancer, was originally told, like Grant, that rest was the cure she was seeking.

  The Singing Sands was published to excellent reviews, and Josephine Tey’s work was reassessed as a whole, as her other Grant novels were also republished after her death.17 It is her most significant work, and is a reminder that she could have achieved even more if she had lived.

  Beth’s legacy to the National Trust in England attracted some attention in the press after her death, particularly in Scotland, where people unfamiliar with her life story could not understand why she had not left the money to a local or Scottish charity. The initial legacy that Beth left the National Trust was spent on buying, in 1954, 142 acres of gardens in Sussex and a fifteenth-century gatehouse at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk.18 Oxburgh is a grand manor house, with a moat around it, which was built by the Catholic Bedingfield family in the fifteenth century. It now houses tapestries worked by Mary, Queen of Scots, a connection that would perhaps have interested Gordon Daviot. It’s in the east of England, a little further north than the area Beth really liked; neither of the National Trust sites are places she had any particular connection to, but she would have appreciated that her money was spent how she wished. However, the Daviot Fund continued and continues to bring in money, more than sixty years after Beth MacKintosh died. As it has turned out, it has been a gift that has caused them some administrative difficulty, as it needs continuous management. It is now run through the publishing department of the Trust, rather than the Legacies department.19 All monies generated are now put into the Trust’s General Fund, which is used for priority projects in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. What the National Trust does not do, however, is manage Beth’s literary reputation in any way. For them, the copyright to the books is an unusual, though welcome, way of generating income. Requests to use or adapt the books are generally agreed to.

  Beth had been wary of allowing the BBC the right to adapt her work in the years before her death, feeling that they did not offer a high enough fee or respect her wishes as regards changes.20 But after her death, her novels and plays became almost a staple for the Saturday Night Theatre programme, a guarantee of good audiences. The number and type of adaptations of Beth’s work increased significantly in the years after her death, and some of the adaptations took great liberties with her original plots. For example, the maker of Hammer Horror films bought the film rights to Brat Farrar in the year of Elizabeth’s death, finally adapting the book in 1963, though their ‘version’ was so far removed from the original Brat Farrar that Josephine Tey is not named in the credits. Paranoiac retains enough of the original to make its source material clear though, including many of the names: Simon Ashby, a wealthy psychotic who enjoys playing the church organ, tries to drive his sister Eleanor insane to get the family money, but is thwarted by a man who pretends to be his long-lost brother. There’s also a mummy, and it ends with a dramatic fire.21

  However, the constant stream of adaptations, including some more high-quality television adaptations by the BBC, did much to keep Josephine Tey’s books selling: when people saw the films and heard the radio plays, they wanted to buy the books. Beth’s stories appealed to readers, and more and more people kept coming back to read them. Even Paranoiac had a surprisingly high quality cast for a shocker – Oliver Reed was Simon – and was dubbed and released in several countries. It was reissued on DVD in 2010. Beth was well aware of the liberties taken with adaptations – Alfred Hitchcock’s version of A Shilling for Candles had hardly been faithful – and perhaps the benefits of the adaptations outweigh any drawbacks.

  Although Beth’s agents declined to be involved in the execution of her will, they have continued to manage her Josephine Tey books to a certain extent, as did her publisher Peter Davies. Peter and Nico Davies, who had been personal friends of Tey’s, were very much involved in arranging the Penguin editions of Tey’s books, as they had been during Beth’s lifetime, but generally Tey’s books were managed through the David Higham agency. David Higham is still one of the biggest London agencies, but there is now no one at the firm who remembers Tey, and, as with the National Trust, there is a hands-off feel to the management. Even Nico Davies, just a few years after Elizabeth’s death, admitted that they had kept no first editions of her Daviot or Tey novels.22 The Daviot plays, with the exception of Richard of Bordeaux, are all now out of print – although still readily available second-hand.

  Beth’s family had never been involved in her writing career and had never been in touch with her publisher or agent. As Beth had willed the management of her literary estate to third parties, her family have not had any say in what has happened to the books. Neither her family, The National Trust, her agent or her publishers have made any concerted attempt to market or promote Josephine Tey’s books. Opportunities for reprints have been taken, but really they stay in print purely because every successive generation of readers since Beth’s death has wanted to read them. The constant stream of adaptations has kept interest in Beth’s works high, but Josephine Tey’s crime novels have also been established in the crime or mystery novel canon. This extremely popular genre has increased its profile over the last few decades, and has moved from being seen as pulp, throwaway novels to serious literary fiction. Novelists such as Ian Rankin are bestsellers, and their work is given serious review space. Ian Rankin is among the contemporary authors who cite Josephine Tey as an influence, and Tey is often cited as ‘Fifth’ after the ‘Big Four’ crime writers of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – the essential exponents of crime fiction which all aficionados of the genre have at least a passing acquaintance with. Readers and critics talk about her books and recommend them to others. Like Beth’s biggest hit Richard of Bordeaux, her continued success is built on that elusive marker of quality, word o
f mouth.

  There has also been continued interest in Beth’s personal life. She had been seen as something of a mystery even in her own lifetime, and that myth has only increased over time. John Gielgud’s introduction to Gordon Daviot’s collected plays was the first glimpse many of her readers had into her private life. Another small biographical sketch was written by a fellow pupil from the IRA, Mairi MacDonald, who had her essay, ‘The Enigma of Gordon Daviot’, published in the Scots Magazine, before it was anthologized in her collected writings.23 Mairi’s collected writings give a good picture of the Inverness that Beth lived in, but her essay on Gordon Daviot is based far more on research than personal recollection. Her assessment of Gordon Daviot’s career is fair and comprehensive, and as an Invernessian, Mairi understood the difficulties of making the transition to London life, and explains this through her own experiences – but her air of authority and people’s readiness to accept that all Invernessians know each other has led to Mairi’s interpretations of Beth’s character being too often quoted as ‘fact’. Mairi was a snob, who could never bring herself to believe that a shopkeeper like Colin, who left school at fourteen, could ever be intelligent – and neither could a shopkeeper’s children ever be given her full respect. Mixed up in this class snobbery was Mairi’s own attitude to Gaelic. A promoter of the Gaelic language herself, she nevertheless wanted the language sanitized, denying any association with the stereotype of west coast ‘laziness’ that Colin fought so hard against. Mairi’s own personal conflicts greatly affected her ability to write any biography of Elizabeth MacKintosh.

  Mairi was also hampered by the refusal of Beth’s London friends to be involved in any attempt to write a biography.24 Mairi had proposed the idea of a full-length biography to Beth’s publisher Peter Davies, apparently unaware that Peter and Nico were personal friends of Beth. She received in reply a polite but distant refusal. Writing to John Gielgud, Mairi again received a polite refusal: John wrote that neither he nor Gwen would be involved in a biography that was an ‘apologia’. Mairi wanted to present Beth as someone who had disliked her home town and home country, and neither John, Gwen nor the Davies recognized the Gordon Daviot that they knew in Mairi’s portrayal.

  Faced with a lack of information, Mairi considered turning Beth’s life, as she saw it, into a novel. The resultant notes for what she wanted to call Small-Town Genius are dismaying, with dreadful dialogue in an overblown romantic style. Beth, who prioritized scrupulous research and was dedicated to telling the truth, would not have been impressed with a novel that played with not only Beth’s life, but that of her family. Beginning with an extremely lengthy justification of the sort of snobbery and class system prevalent in the Inverness of Beth and Mairi’s youth, the proposed novel went on to mix fact and fiction in a thoroughly libellous way; painting Colin as a social-climbing simpleton and his wife Josephine MacKintosh as an English schoolteacher who married beneath her. The draft novel was abandoned after only a chapter or so. One can only hope that on re-reading what she had written Mairi caught a glimpse of how unacceptable it would have been.

  Caroline Ramsden made an explicit attempt to redress what had been said about her friend in her own autobiography Life on Primrose Hill, presenting, unlike Gielgud, a picture of a woman who may have been shy, but who did attend parties, and who, above all, was ‘a grand friend to have’.25 But Lena’s autobiography, entertaining though it was, reached only a small audience. Josephine Tey remained a mystery.

  As Tey’s work continued to be read and republished year after year, other attempts were made to find out about her life. A few researchers took the simple step of showing up in Inverness and asking around, knocking on the door of her old house and asking in Colin’s old shop and in the local library and so on. Because Beth had been such a private person – and because most of her close friends and family had lived elsewhere, and were now resistant to the idea of a biography – these research trips tended to produce more gossip than real fact, which was then endlessly recycled into every new essay on Beth’s life. For example, after her death her home, Crown Cottage, was bought by her neighbour, Hamish Macpherson. Mr Macpherson had not known much about Beth’s writing career before her death, but when he moved into her house he was intrigued by the letters – and researchers – which continued to arrive for her. He was more than happy to talk to researchers and reporters who knocked on his door, and began to see himself as something of an expert on Josephine Tey. He was extensively quoted in a BBC documentary about Elizabeth MacKintosh broadcast in the 1980s, and also in articles in the Inverness Courier right up until the 1990s.26 Much like Mairi MacDonald, his word was given particular credence because he had actually known Beth when she was alive. Unfortunately, he and Beth had not actually got on terribly well, and Mr Macpherson was neither particularly interested in reading or the theatre, nor a fan of Beth’s work. Unlike Mairi MacDonald, he did not do such thorough research, and relied on his own memories, not all of which were complimentary. He had always felt that his former neighbour was unapproachable, and his dislike of her extended to describing her as ‘strutting’ down the street when she walked, something hard to believe of a former Anstey student. Mr Macpherson was also personally displeased by the idea that Beth had left her money to the National Trust in England, as he felt that she should have done more for her home town of Inverness, and her home country of Scotland.

  As critics and university courses began to take crime fiction more seriously, a number of essays, encyclopedia entries and articles were published, which attempted to set Elizabeth MacKintosh’s work in context. Each of these suffered because of their artificial division between her ‘Josephine Tey’ and ‘Gordon Daviot’ writing, and in particular a lack of understanding of the context of Beth’s life and the full extent of her work. Writing on Gordon Daviot’s theatre work is usually included tangentially in summaries of 1930s theatre, or biographies of Gielgud, Ffrangcon-Davies, Olivier, or the other great actors and actresses she worked with, with a tendency to focus on Daviot’s words rather than her life. Biographical sketches remained short, and were largely based on what John Gielgud and Mairi MacDonald had said. Most contained some version of the idea that Josephine Tey the mystery writer was a mystery herself, and that writing a biography about her would be virtually impossible.

  American scholar Sandra Roy produced a full-length assessment of Josephine Tey’s literary output in 1980, but this book contains only a summary of Beth’s life before turning to her writing.27 It examines all Beth’s work, including her writing under the Daviot pseudonym and her theatrical pieces, but it treats only her Tey mystery novels in depth. It puts her writing in the context of its time – though never in the context of the Scottish Literary Renaissance – and collects together many contemporary reviews of Beth’s work, but it is essentially a work of opinion. Some of the facts are wrong (including Beth’s date of birth), and it repeats some gossipy details as truth (including the idea that Beth rarely left Inverness). The book also suffers, as do many other works on Tey, from an American bias, locating Inverness as ‘near Loch Ness’ – which is strictly speaking true, and which would mean something to an American unfamiliar with Scottish geography, but is not how an Invernessian would ever describe their city. Someone living by Loch Ness would be considered by an Invernessian to be living out in the country – and this would be particularly true in the 1920s, when transport was more limited, and in the 1930s and 40s, when travel outwith Inverness was limited because of military activity in the area. Academic assessments like Roy’s have ended up drawing conclusions which are redundant, or even plain wrong, because they are not strongly enough rooted in the reality of Beth’s life.

  The serious critics’ love and knowledge of the novels they are writing about is what makes their essays readable, rather than what the essays reveal about how detective fiction fits into literary or sociological theory. The same could be said of the other style of essay that has been written about Josephine Tey, the love-letter to her wo
rks composed by avid fans, who are usually fans of detective fiction in general, and who have a very thorough knowledge of the genre that they love. Many blogs on the internet feature short articles of this type, and some have been collected and published. The best of these combine the author’s love of Tey with another love or piece of knowledge that they have (for example, knowledge of another contemporary writer, knowledge of 1930s theatre, or something more esoteric like knowledge of transport), and so shed new light on Tey’s work by looking at it from new angles. However, they too suffer from a lack of knowledge of the facts of Tey’s life.