Gordon Daviot (better known as Josephine Tey, real name Elizabeth Mackintosh) dedicated her first detective novel, The Man in the Queue (May 1929), to her typewriter, which she called Brisena. "To Brisena," the author declared in the book, "who actually wrote it."
The Man in the Queue was Tey's first mystery with her hero, Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, and was written in a little more than two weeks for a competition sponsored by the book's original publisher, Methuen. The first US edition was published in July 1929 by E.P. Dutton & Co of New York.
Sounds like Brisena got a fair belting in that fortnight, so no wonder the book was dedicated to her.
I was introduced to Tey this week by an excellent article ("Decades After Her Death, Mystery Still Surrounds Crime Novelist Josephine Tey") by Francis Wheen in the latest edition of Vanity Fair to reach these shores. The go-first says, "Unlike Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and [New Zealand's] Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey
ignored the rules of golden-age British crime fiction - with brilliant results.
But 60 years after her death, the greatest mystery Tey created still may be
herself."
Josephine Tey was a
pseudonym used by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896-1952), a
Scottish author best known for her mystery novels. Mackintosh was
born in Inverness.
The most
famous of her Inspector Grant novels is The Daughter of Time, which in 1990 was selected by the British Crime Writers' Association as the greatest
mystery novel of all time.
The late Peter Hitchens wrote that, "Josephine Tey's clarity of
mind, and her loathing of fakes and of propaganda, are like pure, cold spring
water in a weary land". He said Tey showed we are too easily fooled, that ready
acceptance of conventional wisdom is not just dangerous, but a result of
laziness, a lack of curiosity and of a resistance to reason. Hear, hear!
I'm going to give her a read. Thank you for making her known to a wider audience.
ReplyDelete~Joe Van Cleave
Indeed - an author I hadn't heard about to add to my queue. Thanks! (:
ReplyDeleteI had never heard of her either.
ReplyDeleteTwo weeks -- wow! (National Novel Writing Fortnight?)
A striking woman. News to me too!
ReplyDeleteI'm with the rest...first time I've heard of her. Not to say I will not look for her books though.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this insight. I've just finished The Man in the Queue and came across your post whilst searching for the meaning of Tey's dedication to Brisena. It was something I read by Peter Hitchens that put me onto this book in the first place, so I must point out that he, Hitchens, is still very much alive, as you might by now realise. He is the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens.
ReplyDeleteHa! I also just finished Man in the Queue and searched to find the meaning of her dedication. She seems a brilliant yet withdrawn woman, Daughters of Time’s success in no small part to how she was analogous to Grant as the lay(-ed up) armchair detective. Thank you for the post!
ReplyDelete