Ghosts from the library, p.3
Ghosts from the Library, page 3
However, in the early 1920s, MacKintosh gave up teaching to look after her mother at their home, Crown Cottage, near Loch Ness, where after her mother’s death she decided to stay and keep house for her father. She had always enjoyed writing and in 1926 she was published for the first time with stories appearing under the name ‘Gordon Daviot’. It has been suggested that the pseudonym combined her favourite male forename with the name of a village near the river Nairn where she had holidayed as a child. ‘Daviot’ was a regular entrant in the weekly ‘Problems and Prizes’ competition run by the Westminster Gazette and she was often among the prize-winners. In February 1926, she came second with ‘The Last Straw’, a stinging little anecdote that ends with a devastating twist; in March of the same year, her story ‘Canis Major’ came second in one competition, while the satirical ‘True Gratitude’ won a prize in another; and the humorous ‘The Modern Pirate’ was also a prize-winner in April. The newspaper also published several charming pen portraits by ‘Daviot’ of Perthshire children, stories such as ‘Pat Wears His Second-Best Kilt’ and ‘Janet’, as well as her account of the 1927 Highland Games and poems that included ‘The Song of Racing’ and ‘The Song of Stations’, which concerned the journey from London to Inverness.
In the late 1920s, she began work on a novel. The result, Kif (1929), was Dickensian in concept but distinctly more compact, recounting the ‘unvarnished history’ of an ex-soldier who finds peace harder than war, drifting into petty crime and worse. At the same time, the publisher Methuen had announced a detective story competition, judged by A. A. Milne, H. C. Bailey and Father Ronald Knox. She did not win, but while few reviewers were convinced by the merits of the story that did—by N. A. Temple Ellis—her entry was widely praised on publication. As required by the competition’s rules, The Man in the Queue (1929) is very much a detective novel, complete with a realistic but memorable detective, Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. However, despite the positive response to the book, MacKintosh parked the idea of writing detective fiction and her next novel, The Expensive Halo (1931), was a light but rather slow romantic comedy about two contrasting London families.
During her periodic visits to her sister in London, she regularly went to the theatre and in the early 1930s she decided to become a playwright. Ambitiously, she began by retelling the life of a Shakespearean king and, with Richard of Bordeaux (1932), produced by and starring John Gielgud, ‘Gordon Daviot’ exploded into the theatre. While working on the follow-up, Queen of Scots (1934), MacKintosh scripted a film, Youthful Folly (1934), originally titled Intermezzo and based on The Expensive Halo; this led to her signing a contract to write for Universal Pictures but this seems to have led to little other than some uncredited work on the script for Next Time We Love (1936).
Her next play to be produced was a tragic romance that she said had been ‘suggested’ by the lives and love of the sculptor Henri Gaudier and the writer Sophia Brzeska. The Laughing Woman (1934), was not well received but with Queen of Scots (1934) she consolidated the reputation of ‘Gordon Daviot’. Like Richard of Bordeaux, the first production starred Gwen ffrangcon-Davies and it was also produced by John Gielgud. As well as providing a rounded portrait of the doomed queen, MacKintosh focused on the question of Mary’s guilt as an accessory to the murder of Lord Darnley, anticipating the historical investigation to be undertaken by Alan Grant in The Daughter of Time (1951); Darnley’s murder fascinated MacKintosh and she revised the relevant scenes in Queen of Scots to produce a one act play, Kirk o’ Field (1940).
As ‘Daviot’, MacKintosh continued to write plays for the stage and radio, her last being the posthumously produced Dickon (1955), about Shakespeare’s ‘villain’ king, Richard III. In later years MacKintosh adopted a third pen name, ‘F. Craigie Howe’, named for a Scottish ancient monument and adopted to separate the work in question, a relatively weak stage play, from the works of ‘Gordon Daviot’.
In the mid-1930s, to supplement her income as a playwright without affecting her reputation, MacKintosh decided to write another detective story and to bring back Alan Grant. Although The Man in the Queue had been written by ‘Gordon Daviot’, the reputation that that name had garnered meant that a new pseudonym was needed and so Bess MacKintosh became ‘Josephine Tey’, combining her mother’s forename with a phonetic rendering of the name of Scotland’s longest river. An immediate success, A Shilling for Candles (1936) was optioned by Alfred Hitchcock and released the following year in Britain as Young and Innocent (1937) and in America as The Girl Was Young.
Perhaps surprisingly—and certainly disappointingly—MacKintosh decided to concentrate on her career as a playwright, publishing only one book in the next ten years and then as ‘Gordon Daviot’. Claverhouse (1937) is a revisionist hagiography of John Graham, the first of the Jacobites. ‘Josephine Tey’ did not return until Miss Pym Disposes (1947), whose setting owes something to Anstey Physical Training College where MacKintosh had trained 25 years earlier. Fortunately, ‘Tey’ was now back for good. The Franchise Affair (1948) reimagines the eighteenth-century case of Elizabeth Canning, while disappearances are also at the centre of Brat Farrar (1949) and To Love and Be Wise (1950). In 1949, MacKintosh was invited to join the Detection Club. She accepted but as she never attended a formal meeting she was never enrolled as a member. Grant’s penultimate case, The Daughter of Time (1951), is surely MacKintosh’s best, a bed-bound investigation into a crime that took place 500 years earlier, the disappearance of two royal princes, the sons of King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville in 1483. The novel is a perfect combination of the writer’s two great passions—history and mystery—and in 1990 the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the greatest crime novel of all time. MacKintosh’s final novel as ‘Gordon Daviot’ was The Privateer (1952), a romance about the pirate Henry Morgan, and the final ‘Josephine Tey’, The Singing Sands (1952), appeared posthumously.
In comparison with some of the best-known writers of crime fiction, Josephine Tey wrote very few books and, like her contemporary Christianna Brand, this has tended to undermine her status. However, for her ability to present a sensational plot in a realistic manner and her elegant, economical prose, MacKintosh is deserving of a status among the very best.
Around 1950, Bess MacKintosh was diagnosed with cancer. She moved in with her sister who looked after her at her home in Streatham until MacKintosh’s death in February 1952. She left her estate to the National Trust.
‘Deborah’ was published in The English Review in March 1929 as by ‘Gordon Daviot’.
THE RED BALLOON
Q Patrick
The receptionist at the Braeside County Hospital was decidedly snooty. Nor did she condescend to remove her high hat even when I showed my press card from the Sentinel Courier. She had orders, she said.
I had orders, too, said I, and I fingered in my pocket the Colt .32 which I always carried when calling on any case which had the least whiff of homicide. Finally I told her that if I couldn’t see either Lieutenant Trant or Dr Beardsley quick, pronto, tout de suite, there’d be an explosion which—
So she said she’d see.
The explosion, as it happened, had occurred two hours earlier, and I had, quite unwittingly, heard of it first from my young daughter Barbara, when I fetched her from a special Sunday School Class, around noon. She had simply said, ‘Something awfully happened to the two Greiser kids when we came out of school just now. Miss Bedford shooed us away, but there was a red balloon, and well, Ellie Spence said that the Greiser kids were hurt or something.’
I had not given the matter another thought until the middle of our Sunday dinner, when the telephone started shrilling like mad. It was the Big Boss himself, so I knew it was important. Howard Greiser’s two daughters had—well he didn’t know what, but I was to get myself to the Braeside County Hospital at once and ask for either Dr Beardsley or Trant. And since Trant’s name was synonymous with Homicide, I presumed the Greiser children had been murdered, or at best kidnapped. Anyhow, it must have been something pretty sensational to get the Big Boss so excited on a Sunday. Hence my belligerency and the gun.
Meanwhile the receptionist had been ‘seeing’—and finally a female appeared and beckoned. I followed her along subterranean corridors until we reached a room which, from its smell of formaldehyde, I knew to be the morgue. It was full of doctors, arguing, discussing or merely staring. Amongst them was my celebrated uncle, Professor Edgar Saltus.
The attention of them all was fixed on two small figures lying on marble slabs. I took one glimpse, and that was enough. The things—for one could scarcely call them human bodies—were shrivelled and shrunken like two little old monkeys, or like corpses deep-buried centuries ago.
They were, I presumed—and presumed rightly—the remains of the two Greiser children to whom, as Barbara had put it, ‘something awfully funny’ had happened that noon. Quickly, fearfully, I dismissed the shuddering thought that one of those ‘things’ might have been Barbara herself.
I was glad when Tim Trant detached himself from the medicos and came over to me. Though a traditional terror to the malefactor, Trant was as pleasant a fellow as one could wish to meet. We had been friends at Princeton and he gave the Sentinel Courier a break whenever possible.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he suggested, much to my relief. In the passage we lit cigarettes and inhaled deeply.
When I first heard about it,’ he said, ‘it sounded like another of those darn flying saucer scares. But—’ He shrugged—‘you’ve seen for yourself. And there’s no need for me to tell you who or what Howard Greiser is. He could break you and me, the Sentinel Courier, the whole New York Police Force if he wanted to.’
Then Dr Beardsley came out too, and between them they gave me the facts as they were known to date. And I report them as they later appeared in the evening edition of the Sentinel Courier.
SUNDAY SCHOOL TRAGEDY
A strange and, as yet, unexplained tragedy occurred today at the well-known Braeside School for Girls, when Mary (Minnie) and Eveline (Evie) Greiser, aged 9 and 10 respectively, lost their lives. The two children—daughters of Howard Greiser, widely known as a manufacturer and philanthropist—were taken to the school as usual by the old family chauffeur. Both were in excellent spirits and perfect health. The car waited outside the school gates—a little longer than usual, since the junior girls had been rehearsing Nativity Play for the Christmas Festival, and there was also a short presentation of seasonal gifts by the school authorities. Shortly after noon the chauffeur (Joe Williams, 56) saw the children emerging, and opened the door of the car ready for Minnie and Evie. Snow was falling lightly at the time. The younger girl came alone to the car and, while waiting for her sister, remarked on the fact that there was a red balloon in the air, just by a low group of bushes, not fifteen feet from the school gates.
The chauffeur, as well as Miss Ethel Bedford, a Braeside teacher, and several children saw what they described as an ordinary, child’s balloon. They paid no attention to it, thinking it had perhaps broken loose from one of the many Christmas trees that line the Braeside roads. Anyhow, Evie remarked to the chauffeur: ‘Someone’s balloon is flying away. It’s not very high, I’ll go and catch it.’
Impulsively, she ran cross the snow-covered grass and disappeared behind the bushes. The chauffeur waited a few minutes, and then went to investigate. To his horror he found what seemed to be the lifeless bodies of Minnie and Evie, lying in the snow a few feet from each other. His cries brought the school porter and several staff members, who soon summoned aid from both doctors and police.
All this took place within the space of less than five minutes.
Who or what had been lurking behind those bushes to deal such swift and terrible destruction to two innocent children?
No intruder had been seen on the school grounds, and the Police have no theory to offer, since the falling snow had covered any potential footprints. There was no signs of violence and no visible wounds, external or internal, to account for the deaths.
The medical experts are equally baffled, since the disease—if disease it was—had struck so suddenly, and presented post-mortem symptoms unfamiliar to our pathologists. Mention was made of a type of galloping anaemia, sometimes concomitant with certain oriental maladies, but no case has ever been reported in this hemisphere.
That death was instantaneous and probably painless seems to be proved by the fact that numbers of children passed within a few yards of the fatal spot, and none of them heard a cry or even a faint moan.
Miss Ethel Bedford, the teacher who presented the gifts to the children, states that they were of a religious nature and certainly comprised no balloons, red or otherwise.
The bereaved parents are offering a reward of $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of any person or persons responsible for what must, we feel, be classed as a cruel and motiveless crime.
Such was the story I phoned in from the hospital. Trant was waiting for me at the receptionist’s desk.
‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said gloomily. ‘You journalists can spin out yarns on vampires, murderous balloons, flying saucers, little men, unknown poisons, impossible maladies—anything your readers will swallow. But what am I to report to my hard-boiled chief on the Homicide Squad? He wants real facts to chew on.’
‘You might suggest that he start chewing on the works of Charles Fort.’ A familiar, rather squeaky voice sounded from behind me. ‘And perhaps even my own popular articles in the Sentinel Courier.’
My uncle, Professor Edgar Saltus, had moved noiselessly towards us and was staring at Trant over an antiquated pair of spectacles. He was an elfish, wizened little man with a large, baldish head, and clothes that looked as though he slept in them. I had adored him as a child, and now despite the crankiness that accompanied his increasing age, I respected him and enjoyed his company inordinately.
He had turned now and was addressing me severely.
‘And as for you, Edgar James, you should tell that boss of yours to read his correspondence more carefully. I’ve written to him every day this week. I’ve warned him to have his correspondents all over the world on the look-out for something of this sort. I knew it would happen, and I told him so. Of course, I couldn’t guess that it would happen here—right in our own back yard, but—’
‘You mean, you knew—?’ I asked excitedly.
‘Of course I knew; but those old fogies wouldn’t understand if I told them.’ A contemptuous thumb designated the specialists—some of them really famous—whom I had seen in the morgue. ‘But if you young men really want to hear, you can come along with me to my laboratory.’
Having left the necessary instructions with the now less-snooty receptionist, both Trant and I accepted the offer with delight.
My uncle was one of the most colourful and certainly the most controversial figure in the scientific world. The letters after his name might have circled one of the astral spheres which he tossed about so lightly.
Some called him a charlatan, despite the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize before he was forty and held an honorary Chair in four or five of the world’s greatest Universities. He had been distinguished as a biologist, pharmacologist, physicist and many other things in his time, shifting his interest as soon as he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of the science in question. I had often heard him say—and modesty was not one of his cardinal virtues—that he was the only man living who could talk intelligently with Einstein on his particular subject. But there was no man living who could talk to him, Professor Saltus, on all his numerous specialties. Recently he had chosen to style himself as the world’s greatest astronomer.
And I was not the man to prove him wrong.
One great gift he had which is rare among great scientists. He could talk and write on the most recondite subjects accurately and scientifically, and yet so simply that an intelligent boy of fifteen could understand him. This gift, being usually considered incompatible with really expert scientific knowledge, had made him an outcast among his lesser contemporaries. But it had made him a fortune, and had, incidentally, tripled the circulation of the Sentinel Courier’s Sunday supplement, where, in kindness to me, he had contributed such famous articles as: And Why not Life on Venus?, The ‘Lost’ Planet, Out Goes Our Sun, and many others. Although I was his normal heir, he was, as he often told me, leaving his money to increase in an enormous trust fund, to be used at some distant date when men would dare really to think for themselves, and when a trip to the moon would be no more than a one-block ride in a bus.
We drove to his so-called laboratory in a nearby New York suburb. It was an enormous room, whose walls were so thickly lined with books that no self-respecting fly could have found sufficient wall-space. There were no intricate machines, no telescopes, microscopes or other paraphernalia such as one might expect in a scientist’s laboratory. The only sign of his astronomical interests was a ticker-tape which was connected with Mount Palomar in California.
He sat us down, side by side like school children, and handed us a scrapbook containing newspaper clippings, either actual or as photostatic copies. These were in many languages, but in each case the English translation was typed neatly below.
While we studied them, he made fussy little preparations—for he had a childlike desire always to put on a good show, with himself ‘playing teacher’—and at last mounted a small rostrum between two screens.
