Josephine Tey, pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh Biography

British crime writer and dramatist, born in Inverness. During the 1920s she worked as a school physical education teacher. She wrote eight excellent detective stories most of which feature Inspector Alan Grant, on whom Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn appears to be modelled. The first, originally published under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, is The Man in the Queue (1929; alternative US title Killer in the Crowd), which was followed by, among others, A Shilling for Candles: The Story of a Crime (1936), Miss Pym Disposes (1946), To Love and Be Wise (1950), The Singing Sands (1952), and The Daughter of Time (1952), in which Grant re-examines the supposed murder by Richard III of his two nephews in the Tower of London. The Franchise Affair (1948) is a fictional adaptation of the famous eighteenth-century Elizabeth Canning case. As Gordon Daviot she wrote novels (Kif: An Unvarnished History, 1929); a biography, Claverhouse (1937); a fictionalized life of the buccaneer Henry Morgan (The Privateer, 1952); and a number of plays for the stage and for radio, of which the best-known is Richard of Bordeaux, first produced in London in 1932 with John Gielgud in the title role. See S. Roy, Josephine Tey (1980).