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From The Times
April 17, 2008

The 50 Greatest Crime Writers, No 46: Josephine Tey

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“My knitting” was how Elizabeth Mackintosh described the elegant, psychologically acute crime novels she wrote as Josephine Tey. She was more famous at the time as the successful playwright Gordon Daviot, but her plays are forgotten now, while the novels have never been out of print. The best known, The Daughter of Time, reassess the case against Richard III in the matter of his nephews' death in the Tower. Tey used Inspector Alan Grant in most of the novels but never stuck to a formula. The Franchise Affair has a teenage girl accusing two women of abduction and assault; Brat Farrar, a young drifter impersonating a lookalike who died in childhood to lay claim to his estate; Miss Pym Disposes, a seething mass of jealous passions in a physical training college. The themes that link the novels are the danger of love and the destructiveness of vanity, stupidity and selfishness.

One to read: Brat Farrar (1949) Buy the book

Marcel Berlins on a crime novel starring Josephine Tey, The Times

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