Elizabeth Mackintosh

Elizabeth Mackintosh was a novelist and playwright who wrote under a number of pseudonyms, most notably as Josephine Tey and Gordon Daviot. She was born and raised in Inverness and taught in the town’s Royal Academy, and later attended Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham. She left her work as a physical training instructor in 1926 following the death of her mother, to look after her invalid father, which gave her the time to start writing.

Short stories appeared in the 1920s in the English Review and Glasgow Herald. Her first detective novel The Man in the Queue was published in 1929, and a play followed in 1932. She wrote eight mystery novels featuring Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, the last of which, The Singing Sands, was published posthumously.

Two of her books were filmed, A Shilling for Candles and The Franchise Affair, and others were adapted for radio and television. Her most successful drama was Richard of Bordeaux, first played in 1932.

Elizabeth Mackintosh died in 1952. She left her entire estate to the National Trust. In 2008, Josephine Tey was fictionalised in the novels An Expert in Murder and Angels With Two Faces by Nicola Upson.