Josephine Tey

Scottish novelist and playwright, author of The Daughter of Time — voted the greatest mystery novel of all time — whose Inspector Grant series redefined the intellectual detective novel.

Josephine Tey was the pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh, a Scottish novelist and playwright who wrote under multiple names — Gordon Daviot for her plays, Josephine Tey for her detective fiction — and who produced, in a career of roughly two decades, a small body of work that has proved extraordinarily durable. Her Inspector Alan Grant novels occupy a distinctive position in the golden age of detective fiction: more psychologically sophisticated than most of her contemporaries, more interested in the nature of evidence and judgment than in the mechanics of plotting.

The Daughter of Time, published in 1951 and the last novel she completed before her death, is her undisputed masterpiece. Voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers’ Association, it features Grant bedridden and investigating the 500-year-old cold case of the Princes in the Tower — concluding, against conventional historical wisdom, that Richard III was not responsible for their deaths. The novel is simultaneously a detective story, a work of historical revisionism, and a meditation on how received narrative hardens into accepted fact. It helped inspire the Richard III Society and has continued to influence how non-specialists think about that king.

Tey’s other Grant novels — including The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar, and The Singing Sands — are also notable for their intelligence and their resistance to formula. She died of cancer in 1952, leaving a legacy that crime fiction readers have protected with unusual fierceness. For readers who think they have exhausted the golden age of detective fiction, Tey is the essential discovery that awaits them.