Josephine Tey — The Daughter of Time with Jennifer Morag Henderson

Considered one of the greatest crime novels of all time, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time flipped 450 years of British history on its head by re-examining Richard III’s purported involvement in the murder of his two young nephews, the Princes in the Tower. How did a shopkeeper’s daughter-turned-high-school gym teacher become one of the 20th century’s greatest writers of mystery, literary fiction and theatrical plays? Tey’s biographer, Jennifer Morag Henderson, joins us to discuss the double life that allowed Tey to rocket to stardom while also flying under the radar in her home town of Inverness, Scotland.

Mentioned in this episode:

Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Kif: An Unvarnished History by Josephine Tey

The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

Claverhouse by Josephine Tey

Richard of Bordeaux by Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey: A Life by Jennifer Morag Henderson

Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary, Queen of Scots by Jennifer Morag Henderson

Jofrid Gunn by Jennifer Morag Henderson

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Richard III Society

Anstey Physical Training College

Richard III: The King in the Car Park documentary

Transcript

Episode 296: Josephine Tey (The Daughter of Time) with Jennifer Morag Henderson

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers join our Patreon community. Visit lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron to find out more. 

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off, forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: We are admittedly not sure if today's “lost lady” Josephine Tey qualifies as “lost” or not. I'm sure some of our listeners have heard of this Scottish novelist and playwright who is considered one of the great writers from the golden age of mystery fiction.

KIM: Yes. But you and I had somehow never read her, and sometimes that's enough of a qualification for this podcast. So ironically, Amy, it's funny because you brought this book to my attention. It's kind of wild because you actually aren't a big fan of classic mystery novels.

AMY: You're right. They've never really been my thing, but I came across Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time at a used bookshop last year, and I was arrested by this line on the cover: quote, “One of the best mysteries of all time.” And I thought, “Whoa, that's a brave boast.” I was skeptical but intrigued, especially since this book didn't seem like your run-of-the-mill mystery. 

KIM: No. It actually reads more like a history lesson wrapped in a detective story, and I mean that in the best way possible. 

AMY: So there was another Josephine Tey title on the shelf that I saw at the same time that I saw The Daughter of Time, called Miss Pym Disposes. And the cover on that one made it look like one of those cozy mysteries that I typically tend to avoid, but I decided to grab it anyway. So I walked outta that bookstore with two Tey titles. 

KIM: Okay so here's the mystery I'm dying to solve. Did you, Amy, actually enjoy these two books or did they confirm this just isn't the genre for you? 

AMY: You'll find out in due course. But first, we have another mystery to investigate: the author herself. Josephine Tey lived a double life and operated under several different names in the course of her life. 

KIM: I'm so intrigued, especially since, as Tey teaches us in The Daughter of Time, it's very possible for a historical figure's reputation to be misunderstood by future appraisal.

AMY: Luckily we have Tey's biographer with us today. She's done the real sleuthing on this author's life and work, and we're eager to find out her assessment. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

AMY: Today's guest, Jennifer Morag Henderson, is the author of Josephine Tey: A Life, recognized as one of the Best Books of 2015 by The Observer, The Independent, and The Telegraph. She also wrote Daughters of the North: Jean Gordon and Mary Queen of Scots, which was long-listed for the Highland Book Prize. Jean Gordon, just so you know, was the previous wife of Mary's ill-fated third husband, the Earl of Bothwell.

KIM: Wow I didn't know about her before but now I really want to. I'm so intrigued.

AMY: Yes, right up your alley, Kim.

KIM: Yeah. Jennifer's latest book, published last year, is Jofrid Gunn, a biography in poetry which recounts the story of a 16th century woman who moves from the North Atlantic's Faroe Islands to Scotland. A resident of the Scottish Highlands, Jennifer was instrumental in getting a blue plaque for Josephine Tey in Tey's hometown of Inverness. Jennifer, thank you for joining us.

JENNIFER MORAG HENDERSON: Thank you for inviting me.

AMY:One housekeeping note, listeners. Today’s author used the pen name Josephine Tey when writing mystery novels, but she wrote other novels (and was a celebrated playwright) under the pen name Gordon Daviot. She also wrote one book as “F. Craigie Howe.” Her actual name was Elizabeth MacIntosh, or “Beth.” So you may hear us switching between those names occasionally, but don’t be confused. They are all the same person.

KIM: It is so funny because I have read mysteries forever and I don't remember knowing any of those names. I love a woman with multiple aliases. So Jennifer, we mentioned in our intro we weren't sure Josephine Tey was truly lost. I'd love you to weigh in on that. And can you also tell us what prompted you to want to chronicle her life?

JENNIFER: Yeah, it's really fun when I tell people that I've written a biography of Josephine Tey; I either get a completely blank look and people don't know who she is at all, or they kind of grab my arm and they're like, “I have read everything that she has written. She is my favorite author!” So she's kind of one or extreme or the other, and there's nothing in between. If people read her books, they love her books. And I read her books and loved them. My mom gave me them to read when I was quite young. And, she told me that she was from Inverness, which is where I'm from. I grew up in Culloden, just outside Inverness, and I was like, there is nothing in here that is Inverness. It's not on the surface. And by that time I had kind of, you know, studied university and there's kind of an idea of Scottish literature and I was really intrigued as to how Josephine Tey fitted into this Scottish literature because she seemed to be doing something completely different. So I started looking into her life, and I just got more and more interested in it, and eventually realized that in fact a lot of people just didn't know all of this stuff. And I wanted to try and share the truth about her life.

AMY: Okay, so Elizabeth MacIntosh, was born in 1896, and it almost seems like this concept of dueling identities with her names was perhaps baked into her at birth. Can you tell us briefly a little bit about where she came from, how her early years in Inverness might have informed her work? 

JENNIFER: Yeah. So she grew up in Inverness, and her father Colin, he was a, native Gaelic speaker from the west coast of Scotland. And there's a kind of a little bit of tension between Gaelic-speaking and English-speaking... Her father really saw speaking English as the key to success. That was the key to getting out of poverty. So she wasn't very connected to her Gaelic background at all. Her father ran a fruit shop in town, and her mother joined that when she got married and they ran the shop together. But before her marriage, her mother had been a pupil teacher, which was a kind of way for people from kind of a poorer background to become teachers. So they would start when they were students themselves and they'd be teaching the younger class of students. So she's kind of working her way up. And they both come from poorer backgrounds, but they're really, really hardworking, and to kind of move to a slightly higher social class… I think class is a really, really big part of Josephine Tey's books, and Josephine Tey's identity. And to be the daughter of a shopkeeper is kind of an identity that does not match with her later identity as a bestselling successful playwright and author. So, yeah, so she has kind of multiple different identities. And yeah, she does lean into that by using multiple pen names.

KIM: That's so interesting.

JENNIFER: Yeah, I mean, some people find the different names very confusing, but actually I would say probably people in the Highlands find it less confusing because we do have this dual language thing of Gaelic and English. And Gaelic is quite an unusual language in that if you watch Gaelic news, for example, they translate people's names … like Jamie would be Seamus. And I would be quite used, myself, from growing up in the Highlands, knowing somebody could be called both Jamie and Seamus, and it's the same person. So yeah, so that's an interesting thing that audiences have kind of said to me when I've done talks about Josephine Tey.

KIM: Oh that is so interesting. We're going to talk a bit more about her Scottish heritage coming up. But let's jump ahead in time to 1915 when, following secondary school, Beth enrolls in the elite Anstey Physical Training College near Birmingham England. And this school would go on to inspire the women's college that is the setting of her novel Miss Pym Disposes. Beth was in training to become a gym teacher as we might call it here in the States. But Jennifer, it seems like that description falls a little bit short. Can you explain Anstey a little better?

JENNIFER: Yeah, she did become a P.E. teacher, but training to do physical education at that time includes a really large component of physiotherapy. One of the reasons that she became interested in that is because of the First World War. And obviously, physiotherapy as a discipline, unfortunately develops quite rapidly because there's so many soldiers coming back with injuries that need to be worked on. And she was a very able gymnast, so she came to PE training from that angle. But she did work as a physiotherapist as well as a PE teacher. I absolutely loved researching the Anstey section of my biography. I got to go to an “old girls reunion,” which was wonderful. Just all these amazing women. I want to be like them when I grow up. 

AMY: I can imagine those women being so excited about your biography because they must celebrate Josephine Tey as one of their own and feel that's quite special.

JENNIFER: They had all read Miss Pym Disposes, and they said that Anstey is very recognizable in the book, to the point where they could pinpoint the rooms that she was describing and who was in which dormitory and things like that.

KIM: Oh I love that.

JENNIFER: They all loved the book, and a couple of them remembered Josephine Tey coming to Anstey [to visit].

KIM: Oh that's amazing.

JENNIFER: Anstey was really, at the time, a real moment of progress in women's education. Even the things that they wore, like short tunics to do P.E. was quite revolutionary, and the head mistress, or rector of Anstey, she was very involved in the women's suffrage movement. So there's a lot going on at Anstey.

AMY: There's the stereotype of like, okay, somebody's going to be a gym teacher, you know, maybe they're not well-read, they're not, you know, going to wind up becoming this great writer someday. But Anstey was intellectually rigorous, right?

JENNIFER: Definitely. Yes. I mean the sort of medical training we're talking about, like later on, in the history of Anstey, it links up with universities and some of their courses are run as part of the medical degrees. So that's the sort of level that we're talking about and it had a very high standard, it was one of the top P.E. colleges along with Bedford in Britain at the time. Uh, it's far from the Highlands. I mean, she could have gone to a different place, but she wanted to go to the best. She said herself that she wanted a life of many facets. She had this interest in writing, but she knew she was going to have to earn a living. She is the daughter of a shopkeeper. She is not going to be able to sit around and write with the possibility that it might not get published. Um, she's a very active person throughout her whole life. And I think it's kind of an artificial distinction between you're a P.E. person, sporty person, intellectual person, I mean she was both. She managed to combine them really, really well.

KIM: Yeah and I think you know her fictional portrayal of Anstey really gives a sense of you know both of those pieces, the sport and the intellect, too. So let's leap in to talk a little bit about the book Miss Pym Disposes. Tey published it in 1946. It was her sixth book and it's her third mystery. The title character is Miss Lucy Pym. She visits the Ley's Physical Training College as a guest speaker and she becomes unwittingly invested in some drama surrounding the students And this book reminded me a lot of one of my favorites, Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, in terms of the setting at an all-girl college and getting to know all these different characters the instructors the students et cetera.

AMY: Yeah, I thought of Gaudy Night right away as well, Kim, and I should mention too that I am actually a former gymnast. And then I was a one-time gymnastics instructor (that was one of my jobs in college) and I was also quite a Type A student in school. So I think that I would've been a prime candidate for Ley's Training Academy. 

KIM: Completely.

AMY: This is the first adult novel that I ever read, that really has gymnastics as the focal piece of the book. That drew my attention. She describes, you know, some of the stunts they're doing on the balance beam. But what struck me most about this novel is that there wasn't any actual mystery or crime or incident until Chapter 16, which is three-fourths of the way through the novel. So I'm turning the pages, loving the gymnastics stuff, loving the all girls setting, characters, but I'm like, “Wait, is this a mystery? Where's the incident?” 

KIM: But you know it's coming, right? Didn't you feel the tension? 

AMY: I did, but that was so unusual for me. Usually a mystery novel starts with an occurrence.

KIM: A dead body.

AMY: Exactly.

JENNIFER: Yeah, I looked at the Penguin archive when I was doing the research for my biography, and there was actually some discussion of… you know the Penguin crime novels with the green covers?

KIM: Mm-hmm 

JENNIFER: There's actually some letters “Well, is this actually a crime novel? Can we put this in the green covers?” Um, so yeah, that's really interesting. She'd already published other books at this time that were not crime novels, that kind of maybe filed under sort of literary fiction. Miss Pym Disposes is like a real turning point where she's like, yeah, I am going to lean into the crime aspect rather than on literary fiction. Definitely the comparison with Gaudy Night. And there's so much in Gaudy Night where the women are kind of questioning women's education, and it's so interesting to read that next to Miss Pym Disposes, because the women in Miss Pym Disposes, they are completely certain they are on the right path… in their education, anyway.

AMY: Yeah. You almost wouldn't call it a crime what happens in the book. 

JENNIFER: It's like a psychological study. 

AMY: Yes, exactly, and it's all having to do with the girls' ambition.

KIM: Yeah

JENNIFER: And I think that that's really one of the things she does so well in her crime fiction, is getting into heads and getting into their psychology rather than a kind of a more formulaic setup of “here's the crime and we're going to solve it.”

KIM: Yeah And I love Miss Pym herself, just the character of her and how she's thinking about everything that's happening and processing it and how it kind of changes her. It's so good.

AMY: I love the fact, too, that she is a single woman and so unapologetic about it. She's not your typical spinster. She's made the decision that her life is better off this way and she has no regrets about it, seemingly.

JENNIFER: I think Tey’s books are books for single people who are perfectly happy that way.

KIM: That's great. Uh, Jennifer, would you like to read a short passage from Miss Pym Disposes so our listeners can get a feel for her writing style?

JENNIFER: Okay. So this is where Miss Pym is kind of looking around the staff room and thinking about what sort of people go to a physical training school. 

If this were any other kind of college, that gathering would've been homogenous. If it were a college of science, the gathering would consist of scientists. If it were a college of divinity, of theologians. But in this long, charming room with its good pieces and its chintzes, with its tall windows pushed up so that the warm evening flowed in through them full of grass and roses. In this one room, many worlds met. Madame LeFevre in thin elegance on a hard empire sofa and smoking a yellow cigarette in a green holder represented a world theatrical, a world of grease, paint, art, and artifice. Ms. Luxe sitting upright in a hard chair represented the academical world, the world of universities, textbooks and discussion. Young Miss Rag busy pouring out coffee was the world of sport, a physical, competitive unthinking world. And the evening's guest, Dr. Enid Knight, one of the visiting staff, stood for the medical world. All these worlds had gone to make the finished article that was a leaving student. It was, at least, not the training that was narrow.

AMY: Hmm. I love that. All walks of life, but yes, the faculty are just as important in the intrigue, I would say that's happening.

JENNIFER: And just a few of the descriptions as well, like, when the window’s open and the evening flows in through the window “full of grass and roses.” Josephine Tey has some really good turns of phrase sometimes, and she's really good at kind of capturing how a person looks in a couple lines, like the teacher reclining on the sofa with the cigarette.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: She almost didn't need this book to have the mystery. Like, it would've been just as interesting to read… as someone who doesn't like mysteries, that wasn't the intriguing part of the book for me.

JENNIFER: Josephine Tey is sometimes called “the crime writer’s crime writer” because loads of crime writers read her and are inspired by her, but she's also a really good crime writer for people who don't like crime.

AMY: Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah she definitely goes a different route. It's very unexpected. 

AMY: So moving on with her own personal life, Beth MacIntosh would've been attending Anstey, this real physical training school, during the years when World War I was raging. The war impacted pretty much everyone's lives. Can you talk about how it shaped Beth's life in particular?

JENNIFER: Yeah, there are some very particular experiences of the First World War in the Highlands, some of which are quite sad. If you follow the local papers from the First World War, a lot of information is being sent back and people are, very, very aware of what's going on. And she would've been following boys that she'd been at school with, um, are dying they're 18 years old and that's it. One of her friends later on in life said that she often kind of said, look, you know, you've got to seize the moment 'cause we're all going to die. And I think she had that outlook. Crime fiction does kind of develop around the first World War. If it's in fiction, you can kind of control the death and understand it. And I do think there's an element of that, of why crime fiction becomes so popular in the interwar years. And like many young women, the death of so many men in the First World War changed lives afterwards.

AMY: Far fewer potential husbands around.

JENNIFER: Fewer men, and they'd also got used to working and being on their own. So, yeah, it changes a lot for a lot of people, and you can definitely see that in Beth's life as well. 

KIM: Then also in 1923 her mother died which also really impacted the course of her life as well, right?

JENNIFER: Yeah, that's the big turning point. So after she's graduated from Anstey, she has a variety of jobs in England, in London. She does work very, very briefly in Scotland, near to where her father's family are from. Um, and she actually has an accident in the gym, which is the inspiration for the accident in Miss Pym Disposes. 

AMY: Oh, wow.

KIM: Okay.

JENNIFER: And she leaves that job and she goes back down to England, and she manages to build a life down in the south of England. She's very happy working as a teacher down there. But then she gets a call from Inverness say that her mother is ill, and unfortunately it is terminal cancer. And Beth comes home straight away. But yeah, her mother dies, and then after that, she's the oldest and she has two sisters, and they decide that Beth is going to be the one who's going to stay and keep house for her father after their mother dies. From that moment on, she lives in Inverness, and sometimes she likes it, sometimes not so much, but she kind of uses this moment, the loss of her mother obviously, and then the loss of her career, and she kind of turns it into an opportunity. She's like, “Well, I've always wanted to write and I'm really going to focus on that.” And so from this moment on, she focuses on her writing.

KIM: I love this. A career pivot.

AMY: And it also leads her back to this sort of duality where she's at home in Inverness caring for her father, but then the writing portion of her life is going to start sending her to London where she can have a little bit more freedom, and pursue professionally what she wants to do. So she's going back and forth eventually, in between these two worlds, which is really wild. How does she transition from one-time gym teacher to professional writer?

JENNIFER: So what she first starts doing is entering competitions in newspapers. And eventually, she wins so many that they get her to set the competitions, which is just fantastic.

KIM: Yeah!

JENNIFER: And she's also writing what becomes her first novel, which is called Kif, which is this story of a soldier returning after the First World War to a Britain that is not, in fact, a home for heroes. And then also her very first crime novel, The Man in the Queue...She actually writes that in response to a competition as well, a competition advertised for a crime novel. And it's quite close to the deadline and she was like, “Oh, well, I'll just let that one go.” And then she said she just had this idea that struck with such force that it hurt. And she sits up at her typewriter for two weeks nonstop just typing and typing and typing and produces the manuscript for The Man in the Queue and sends that off to the competition. It doesn't actually win, but they like it so much they decide to take it on and publish it.

KIM: Oh that's great.

JENNIFER: And simultaneously with that, her first novel, Kif, has been accepted for publication. And she kind of did that the slow way, like she sent it out to agents and that took her years and years and years. But she wouldn't have been able to write The Man in the Queue if she hadn't spent the years and years on Kif. But actually it also gets accepted. So she ends up with two books accepted for publication in the same year in 1929, and they're both published under the male pen name Gordon Daviot. Daviot is a place just outside of Inverness, and it's where she used to go for summer holidays. But her publishers did not know that she was a woman. The only way they found out was that her books are so successful that they managed to sell them to the U.S. So she's going to have a U.S. publication of both her first two novels, and the U.S. publisher asks for a photo. So she goes to get a photo taken and then she goes down to London on the train with the photo and goes to her publisher, says, “Can you announce Gordon Daviot, please?” And then she walks into the room, this tiny little Highland woman in a tweed suit.

KIM: Oh I love it.

AMY: Jaw drops. Yeah.

JENNIFER: And they decide not to use the author photo. 

KIM: [laughs] The big reveal. What was her life in London? Was she part of a scene? Can you talk a little bit about that?

JENNIFER: It became quite a glamorous life in London. I open my biography with the description of her getting the sleeper train… So in Inverness, she's the daughter of a shopkeeper and she gets on the sleeper train at night in the Highlands and wakes up in the morning in London. She would go to Debenhams and get her fur coat out of storage.

KIM: Oh my goodness.

AMY: I can see her, after however many weeks or months of the housework at home, caring for her father, being like, “Yes, a trip to London's coming up! I'm so excited for this!” And when you're telling this story about getting off the train and going to retrieve her fur, it reminds me of like Clark Kent going into the phone booth and turning into Superman, so it's like, “Now's my London time and I'm going to be Superwoman here.”

KIM: This is so cinematic. Her life would make a really cool movie or TV show. And that's another surprising twist, I guess. She's big in the London theater scene and she writes a smash-sensation play, “Richard of Bordeaux.” 

JENNIFER: Yeah. 

KIM: Can you talk a little bit about that?

JENNIFER: I don't think you can kind of overstate how big “Richard of Bordeaux” is. Um, it basically makes John Gielgud’s career. 

KIM: Wow. 

JENNIFER: He and his leading lady, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, they make enough money from this play to buy houses in the country. Um, it runs for a year, just completely sold out in London, and then it tours the UK and it transfers to Broadway. It was filmed for television, and television is like just getting started at this time. There isn't actually a television signal in Inverness at the time that it's broadcast. I mean, they were making dolls of the main characters and selling souvenirs like that around this play. Like it was the definition of a smash hit. It was so successful.

AMY: That's amazing. Yeah, I liked looking up the publicity photos from that play too, to see all the costuming and it was quite an extravagant, a high-budget… 

JENNIFER: The costumes were a big part of the success. It is a historical play. And they had a whole, I mean, John Gielgud was really into it and they had like a whole aesthetic and it was like beautiful colors and the designers were all over-the-top. It's a big romantic play, very romantic. It's the interwar years, and it really captured that kind of appeasement, like we shouldn't be fighting, kind of sentiment that was around in the early Thirties. It really kind of struck a chord with people. There's a really good story of Josephine Tey is down from Inverness, and she goes to the first night and it all goes well. But it's the second day when they realize that this is going to be a hit because they are in the ticket office and they look out the window and they realize that there's a queue, like a really, really big queue of people forming. And they end up having to delay the curtain for 15 minutes so that everyone can take their seats. It's very much like Josephine Tey's novels is that they do tend to be a word of mouth thing. If people like Josephine Tey, they tell people. You want to tell people about her books.

AMY: And she's still so early on in her writing career and she's had like now three successes; two books right off the bat, and then this play.

KIM: How did everyone back in Beth's hometown of Inverness respond to her burgeoning fame? Were they celebrating her?

JENNIFER: No, they weren't really celebrating her. This is where the kind of class issues come into play. Again, they can't really reconcile daughter of a shopkeeper with author of the hit London play of the season. And there is an element of real snobbery around that, but also, she does not lean into it either. She's a private person and she wants to kind of get on with the part that she enjoys, which is the writing.

AMY: Yeah, and I can see wanting to just downplay, especially you know, Inverness at the time, it's almost like a village feel, like people… everybody knows one another and not wanting to come back too big for your britches or anything like that. 

KIM: Yes. 

JENNIFER: She has an interesting short story that kind of explores some of those themes about the idea of small towns and do you have to go away from a small town to be a success? And how do people deal with you if you are a success, but you still live in that small town? And I think there are some particular things about that that are specific to the Highlands as well, because people are used to leaving. Even up to today there are fewer opportunities, so people equate success with leaving sometimes. But she does explore in her writing a little bit.

AMY: Okay. So given this blockbuster historical play that we've talked about, it's clear that she had an interest in history, and British history in particular. That's a good segue into this next detective novel that we wanna talk about, The Daughter Of Time. It was published in 1951, so towards the end of her career and her life. Today, it's probably considered her most famous work, and I will leave you in suspense no longer, Kim. I loved this one. 

KIM: Yes! 

AMY: I ate it up. The mystery being solved is really more of a reputational rehabilitation, I would say, of Richard III.

KIM: Yeah I mean even people who don't read Shakespeare have an idea of Richard III. He's this hunchback villain in the plays and ruthless murderer. He orchestrates the death of his two young nephews, the princes in the tower. Um he's not a good guy.

AMY: Or is he? I mean, maybe he is a good guy? And that's the real-life whodunit at the heart of Tey's novel. I loved this book for its compelling history in the same way I kind of liked getting into Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall, but I also love the way the book is structured. So we have Detective Alan Grant, one of the classic detectives of the golden age of mystery fiction. And he is a recurring character in several of her novels, including the first one, The Man in the Queue. In this book, he solves this historic mystery from the confines of his hospital bed. He is laid-up with a broken leg, so all the action takes place at his bedside. Basically think Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. 

KIM: Yes. And she's able to do that and make it so compelling. In 1990 the British Crime Writers Association ranked this novel at number one in their “Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time” list. I mean he's solving it from the bed where he has a broken leg trying to figure out a historical mystery, of all things! So what do you think, Jennifer? What makes this book such a standout to make it number one in the top 100 crime novels of all time?

JENNIFER: Yeah, it's just such an unusual book, and it's quite hard to describe because it, yeah, everything happens in this one room. It's the sort of book that you lend to people and you don't get it back. I remember lending this to her friend and then her phoning me the next morning. She'd read the whole book and she was like, “but how did people…?!!”  Yeah, it's, it's that kind of book. 

KIM: It is!

JENNIFER: I think what you're saying about the structure, I think, yeah, the structure is really clever. Like, it's really compelling reading. You have to keep going. Josephine Tey said that she saw the crime novel as like a sonnet. Like you have a structure, and then you can do all sorts of things inside it. And I think this book, she takes the structure, but then she does all these crazy things inside it. She really cares and she makes you care. 

KIM: That's exactly right.

AMY: If you're trying to describe this book to somebody and you're like, “Well, he's in a hospital bed, and wondering about the historical accuracy and he winds up all these books and then he solves it from the books.” It sounds like it would be so boring because like, it requires these old, primary sources. And it's really just the books and his brain that are helping him solve it. There's not any action. It shouldn't work!

KIM: Yeah.

JENNIFER: She really, really gets what's so good about research. Because she'd written straight biography as well. She wrote a biography of a Scottish figure called Claverhouse, who's a little bit like Richard III. Some people see him as a hero and some as a villain. So she knew what it was like to try and chase down the truth. And it's like that thing where you're so into it and it's so interesting, and then you find a tiny, tiny little detail and you come home and you're trying to explain to everybody why this really, really matters. And she captures it perfectly, why it matters. 

KIM: Completely. So perfectly, that Amy and I … we love anything to do with Shakespeare… So as part of our research for this episode we went to see Richard III back in February. We walked outta the theater and we were both like “No no no… This is all wrong! Josephine Tey exonerated him!”

AMY: Yeah, we're sitting there in the theater seething.

KIM: We're like “No! Of course Richard III is…”

AMY: A good guy.

KIM: Yeah, a good guy!

JENNIFER: Yeah.

KIM: It completely changed my perspective.

AMY: It changed my perspective too. I found Tey's theory fully convincing after I read her book, but then I was kind of let down a little bit because after spending some time on internet message boards, you know, I wanted to like confirm this, outside the novel, I wanted to dive into it more. I noticed some history buffs online were kind of refusing to give Daughter of Time any credence. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on this. Was this book ever taken seriously as like, “Wait, maybe we should reconsider Richard III.” Or do a lot of people just dismiss it as fiction and say she was in error in some way?

JENNIFER: I think Josephine Tey would've loved that you went to try and check it out. Like I think that's her essential point is like, even more importantly than is Richard III guilty or innocent? It's … we can't just take what's told to us as truth. We have to learn how to interpret history and interpret what we're told. And I think that's also why the book is so successful, because that message cannot be argued with. It's so important. Um, but as far as the Richard III, like, there's been so much more publicity around him after the discovery of his body in the car park and the documentary. Oh, amazing documentary. It came out just as I was finishing my book.

AMY: Oh, I need to see that.

JENNIFER: Oh, it's so good. 

KIM: I haven't seen it either. I knew about the car park and everything I didn't know about the documentary.

JENNIFER: Someone phoned me, it was on, and they phoned me and they were like, “You have to turn the TV on right now! You have to watch this!” And it was just like watching it as they made the discovery. I’ve done talks for the Richard III Society, who funded the research to dig up the car park and ultimately find the body. And I loved those talks. Just so many intelligent people asking intelligent questions about history and trying to go back to primary sources. Um, there are some things that Josephine Tey gets wrong. There are some things that I think she gets right. I find her argument very, very compelling. Uh, but I think what I find even more compelling is the idea that you should go and try and find out. And I think that's the important thing to take from it.

KIM: I completely agree with you. Just don't take heroes from the past or whatever or the villains at face value. Do your own research. Don't just follow whatever the history books say necessarily. It doesn't mean that they're right. Who told the history?

AMY: Who told the history? Why they told the history. And I think all the time, especially here in the States, what we're hearing now all the time is “It's Joe Biden's fault. Joe Biden did that.” And of course, Trump wants to change the narrative about everything. And that's exactly what Tey is arguing happened to Richard III, that the guy that came after him, is it Henry VII? I can’t remember who the king is next, but it's basically they had an agenda to vilify him and make it seem like he was the one guilty of all this, of the murders.

KIM: Yeah. And as much as I love Shakespeare’s plays, politics play a part in literature and theater.

AMY: Yeah, and the historic record.

JENNIFER: It does give you a new perspective on these things.

KIM: Yep. Definitely.

AMY: It also makes me think too, you know when I said Hillary Mantel… Josephine Tey does time travel in a way, like even though he's in this hospital bed, she takes you back to the world of Richard III, and as you're learning the backstory of Richard's life and his family and all of that, you are immersed in that world.

KIM: Completely.

JENNIFER: Yeah. 

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: It's so funny, I've read tons of mystery novels in my life but I just had not heard of her! Anyway, let's shift gears a little bit. So you also hail from the Scottish Highlands. So I'm wondering how or where you would position Josephine Tey in the pantheon of Scottish literature. Where does she fit? 

JENNIFER: This is quite an interesting one, and it was one of the reasons why I wanted to write about her. Um, Scottish literature is going through a really, really interesting phase just at the time she is writing. It's called the Scottish Literary Renaissance, but a lot of it is very tied up with Scottish nationalism, and the desire for an independent Scotland. Josephine Tey does not support this at all. She's very kind of small-C conservative, all of her writing life in her writing world is very linked to London, and she doesn't want to lose that connection. And she's also someone who's lived through the first World War, so very much sees things from the British perspective. So that kind of really sets her apart from a lot of the other people who are writing in Scotland at that time. And also, um, she's a woman, and a lot of the Scottish literacy scene is very, very male, and they are meeting together in pubs. And she would not have been in that milieu at all. She would not have been in a pub in Scotland. So I compare her a lot with a Scottish writer called Neil Gunn, whose vision of the Highlands at this time is really influential. It's so interesting to compare him with Josephine Tey, who's also so interested in history and yet writing about it from a completely different angle. And I always say that you can never take a female character from a Josephine Tey novel and put them into a Neil Gunn novel. Because her women are so modern and so independent. They are comfortable with being single, well-educated. And there's a real kind of a, like, within Scottish literature, there's this kind of image of Highland women as these very silent, you know, wrapped in a long plaid. And yeah, that's not a Josephine Tey woman at all. And I very much appreciated, as someone from the Highlands, having different female role models from the literature when I read Josephine Tey’s books than I could get from other Scottish literature of that time period.

KIM: That completely makes sense.

AMY: Do you think the fact that she wasn't stepping up to kind of join the quote unquote “party line” about Scottish nationalism, do you think that caused her to be edged out a little bit? You know, they didn't embrace her as much? The other writers?

JENNIFER: Um, perhaps. Perhaps, again, it's the kind of class issue. It certainly probably has affected how academics have studied her later on, because she's not fitting in with kind of generally what's happening at that moment. So I think she was almost overlooked as a Scottish writer. I mean, she was getting her kind of appreciation from the crime-writing community rather than from the Scottish literature community. But hopefully I think that has now changed a bit with my biography and, of a slightly raised profile of her as being a Scottish writer. 

KIM: Yeah, let's talk about your biography a little bit, because one of the things that struck me was just how private she was. So I feel like, you know, without leaving very much in the way of letters or personal papers, it must have been a challenging job. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

JENNIFER: Yeah, I mean, at first I'd kind of written like quite a large chunk of the book, but then I managed to get in touch with her family and track down her nephew, who was her closest living family member. He lives down in London. And when I did meet up with him, he actually did give me access to quite a lot of personal papers and personal letters, which enabled me to do a much better job with the biography. And that was really like a wonderful moment when I first met him. We met in the British Library in London, and he'd brought an envelope with him and he was like, “Oh, I have some stuff here that you might want to read. I think that I've got some unpublished short stories in manuscript form.” And I was like, “Really? Give me the stories. I need to read these stories right now.” 

KIM: Wow. Wow.

AMY: Just shaking, like. 

KIM: Yeah. Oh. my God, yes. 

JENNIFER: He was like, “Oh, it's, it's just my aunt. I don't understand why you're interested.” And I was like, “Please let me read the stories.” I'm so pleased that we are finally managing to get them published.

AMY: Yes. Let's talk about that.

KIM: This is so great. 

JENNIFER: So I have just edited a collection of Josephine Tey's short writing. So this includes the unpublished short stories that her nephew gave me that time, but also I did quite a lot of work kind of trolling through old newspapers and magazines to find short stories that she had published, mainly before her novels came out, but also a few that were coming out at the time of her big successes. She was still writing short stories for newspapers and magazines. Also a surprising amount of poetry. And some kinds of essays and nonfiction pieces. And then we've included in the collection a couple of letters where she specifically talks about writing and about um, her approach to writing. I think we've decided now on the title, we're going to call it The Making of Josephine Tey. So hopefully it will kind of give the reader an idea of how Josephine Tey develops. 

AMY: When is this going to be available? 

JENNIFER: I'm hoping it will be before the end of this year. The publisher is saying before the end of this year.

AMY: Okay, great. 

JENNIFER: And it is actually a US publisher, a mystery short story publisher called Crippen and Landru. So I'm putting all the information on my website as soon as I've got a publication date.

KIM: All right. That's fantastic. We'll keep people posted as well on that. 

AMY: Is there anything else that we haven't touched on about Josephine Tey that you wanted to make sure we included in this episode? We discussed a lot, but there's also so much more that is in your book. 

JENNIFER: Yeah, and I could talk about Josephine Tey all day. And just, kind of, the more I looked into different parts of her life, the more I learned about my own hometown and learned about history and just … I love biography because you get the kind of individual view, but also the wide view as well, of what's happening in history. 

KIM: Yeah, definitely. Well, I know that I, for one, will never look at Richard III the same way after reading The Daughter of Time. I now think of him as one of the good guys, and I'm so glad I got to discover Miss Pym Disposes. I loved it. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us all the way from Scotland today. We loved having you on the show. 

JENNIFER: Thank you very much.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you liked what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review. Wherever you listen. It helps new listeners find us. We'll be back in two weeks with a fresh episode. But if that's too long to wait, consider signing up for our twice monthly bonus episodes where I talk more about books and history relating to lost ladies of literature. Go to lost ladies of lit.com and click Become a Patron to Learn More, our theme song was written and performed by Jenni Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.