Josephine Tey (pseudonym), author of detective novel voted number one in Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list of British Crime Writers’ Association.

“Josephine Tey and Gordon Daviot were the two pseudonyms used by the dramatist and novelist Elizabeth Mackintosh…born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1897” (1, p. 13).

“The Daughter of Time is a 1951 detective novel by Josephine Tey…In 1990 it was voted number one in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list compiled by the British Crime Writers' Association. In 1995 it was voted number four in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list compiled by the Mystery Writers of America” (2).

“Shunning publicity completely, Miss Mackintosh gave no press interviews” (1. p. 14).

“If the themes of her writings can serve as a guide, and they are the only guide available, Miss Mackintosh saw life as deceptive, unreliable and emotionally dangerous. It is foolish, she says, to believe in anything or anyone for nothing is what it seems. The guilty are usually innocent…; the wise, foolish; and the obvious deduction inevitably wrong. Appearances are generally deceiving. A brother is not a brother but a cousin, a man is not a man but a woman, an innocent girl is in fact a nasty-minded trollop” (1, p. 17).

Inspector “Grant, like Tey’s other protagonists, indulges in orgies of self-blame and endless arguments with his ‘other self ’ " (1, p. 56).

“In Brat Farrar, Tey uses an elaborate system of doubling…The ‘other sides’ that argue with Inspector Grant and Lucy Pym are in this novel personified as real characters. Farrar argues with his criminally inclined ‘voice’ only to discover it personified in the nearly identical murderer, Simon. Each character in the novel has a double, that is, someone like him in position (and in three instances physically identical) but usually opposite in character” (1, p. 108).

“In The Daughter of Time Tey uses a device never successfully approached by her contemporaries. She solves an historical mystery without directly portraying any of the characters involved. It is this ability to create suspense without action, and to establish memorable characters with realistic dialogue that accounts for Tey’s continuing popularity. She spans the worlds of the vicarage and the hard, city detective, creating, especially in her later works, compelling novels of personal conflict and mental self-torture. She provides the reader and herself with a bastion of predictability and surety in a world where all appearances deceive…” (1, p. 184).

1. Sandra Roy. Josephine Tey. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1980.

2. Wikipedia.