To the great Shakespearean actor and sometime Hollywood butler, John Gielgud, she was known as Gordon. Her family – and I expect her oldest friends – called her Bessie or Beth, her actual name being Elizabeth.

To the millions who have read and loved her novels she was and is known as Josephine – Josephine Tey, to be precise – although she did publish at least two works of fiction under her playwrighting nom de plume, Gordon Daviot.

Seven decades after her death, Tey is known above all else for her brilliant and idiosyncratic crime novel of 1951, The Daughter of Time, still regarded as one of the greatest crime novels ever written. It was placed in the number one slot in a ‘top hundred’ list compiled by the Crime Writers’ Association of the UK in 1990.

For all this, during her lifetime Tey was better known as Gordon Daviot, the writer of historical plays, notably Richard of Bordeaux, which made a star of Gielgud when it ran for a year in the West End in the early 1930s. Another drama, Queen of Scots, also directed by Gielgud, helped further the career of Laurence Olivier as well as that of a young James Mason.

In a foreword to Jennifer Morag Henderson’s 2015 biography of Tey, the Scottish crime writer Val McDermid describes her books as ‘still fascinatingly readable decades after their first publication’, and notes that ‘they were all startlingly different from their contemporaries, cracking open the door that made possible the work of successors such as Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendall and Gillian Flynn’.

Henderson describes Tey’s enduring appeal in rather more prosaic but no less accurate terms: ‘The main reason Josephine Tey’s work has stayed in print is that her books are really good… Every new generation of readers rediscovers them, and, having read one, reads them all – and recommends them.’

And so it is. You only have to pick up a book by Josephine Tey to fall into its narrative and be beguiled by her sentences, by her reach.

While it is The Daughter of Time that claimed the number one slot in the 1990 survey of British crime writers, another of her mystery novels found its way into 11th place. If you ask the crime-writing authority Barry Forshaw, author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and crime-fiction critic of the Financial Times, then it’s 1948’s The Franchise Affair that marks ‘peak Tey’.

Forshaw describes it as ‘unquestionably’ her best book. ‘As much a subtle meditation on the nature of appearance and reality as a brilliantly written genre novel’, he declares, ‘this is a startling product of the Golden Age and looks forward with unnerving prescience to the darker, psychological obsessions of the next generation of crime writers.’

It’s all that and more. The setting is a sleepy provincial English town in the 1940s – Milford – which is very Tey, as is the historical inspiration for the plot – the alleged abduction of a young woman named Elizabeth Canning in 1753. The Franchise Affair, therefore, reveals two of Tey’s preoccupations: first, the past and especially the contested past, and, second, the difficulty of knowing, not just of the truth but also what is real.

In The Franchise Affair – which became a film in 1951 starring British husband-and-wife A-listers Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray – we begin with the protagonist (our would be ‘detective’), a middle-aged solicitor named Robert Blair – ‘the only Blair of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet’ – who has just had afternoon tea and biscuits brought in to him. Milford is, we are told, a place ‘where the last post goes at 3:45, [and] the day loses whatever momentum it ever had long before four o’clock’. As he contemplates his tea, the last 25 years of the working life of the firm flashes before his eyes and Tey tells us: ‘It was when his eyes rested on the blue plate where the biscuits had been that Robert experienced that odd sensation in his chest again. The sensation had nothing to do with the two digestive biscuits, not physically. It had to do with the inevitability of the biscuit routine; the placid certainty that it would be a digestive on a Thursday and petit-beurre on a Monday. Until the last year or so, he had found no fault with the certainty or placidity. He had never wanted any other life but this. He still did not want any other. But once or twice lately an odd, alien thought had crossed his mind; irrelevant and unbidden. As nearly as it could be put into words it was: “This is all you are ever going to have.” And with the thought would come that moment’s constriction in his chest. Almost a panic reaction; like the heart-squeezing that remembering a dentist’s appointment would cause in his ten-year-old breast.’

Robert Blair, we discover, is on the cusp of a mid-life crisis and so a crisis is what Tey gives him, when he agrees to represent two women – Marion Sharpe and her elderly mother, known in the story as Mrs Sharpe – living locally at an ugly house called The Franchise who are accused of an extraordinary crime, the abduction and imprisonment of a 15-year-old girl, Betty Kane. What follows is an extraordinary story, which culminates with a brilliantly realised set-piece court-room drama. In all, it’s positively Hitchcockian, with its middle-aged bachelor protagonist driven to sort fact from fiction in a case loaded with jeopardy.

The pleasure of The Franchise Affair is that it forces us to wrestle with the central question over the allegation of abduction itself – did it actually happen or is it a fabrication? Whom to believe, the Sharpes or Betty Kane? Then there’s Blair, who is himself beset by his own self-doubt, over his actions, motivations, over which biscuit to eat first. As a result, as well as being a great ‘crime’ novel it is also a complex visitation on life’s great minefield. How do we choose which path to follow? How do we listen to ourselves? How do we know what we know?

It’s all too easy to look at aspects of the story and take back-bearings on Tey’s own life. Born in Inverness in 1896 and raised in the upwardly mobile household of an increasingly prosperous fruiterer, we can readily imagine in Robert Blair’s becalmed bachelordom and his subconscious desire to escape it, a degree of wish-fulfilment on the part of the author. Tey, after all, had returned home aged 27 to keep house for her father, Colin, following the death of her mother, Josephine, in 1923. This was a role she maintained until Colin’s death in 1950. What emerged was a double life – that of the respectable spinster and devoted daughter, Beth MacKintosh, in Inverness on the one hand, and that of the novelist and the hit playwright Gordon Daviot, happier in metropolitan London on the other.

The Franchise Affair also features Tey’s Scotland Yard police Inspector Alan Grant, the protagonist of five of her novels (though not of The Franchise Affair itself, as he does not lead the action). What Tey tells us is that Grant has a Scots family background and is independently wealthy – he does his police work for the satisfaction of it, not for the income – and can consequently afford certain luxuries that would otherwise be beyond his means. He’s a keen angler. He’s also an ex-serviceman, having done a ‘spot of Intelligence during his Army career’. ‘If you can visualise a dapperness that is not of the tailor’s dummy type, then that is Grant,’ writes Tey, who describes the first moment that Blair sees him in The Franchise Affair thus: ‘By the window, entirely at his ease in a very nice piece of Hepplewhite, was Scotland Yard in the person of a youngish spare man in a well-tailored suit.’ Grant also shares Tey’s passion for history and, as Henderson noted in her biography, an ‘interest in the character of his villains, rather than judgement on them.’ He would be a perfect vehicle for Tey’s quiet and beguiling examination of the human condition.

The first Grant novel proper was Tey’s 1929’s The Man in the Queue, which was published under her Gordon Daviot pseudonym (Daviot was inspired by a favourite childhood holiday location in the Highlands). Tey would later say that, but for a competition, the book ‘wouldn’t have been written at all if Methuen hadn’t offered £250 for a detective novel.’ She is said to have written it in two to three weeks and dedicated it ‘To Brisena, who actually wrote it.’

Brisena was her typewriter.

If this shows a certain flippancy, it is belied by the fact that Tey told an old friend that she regarded The Man in the Queue as a greater achievement than her first novel, Kif: An Unvarnished History, which was evidently the product of much labour and published three months before The Man In The Queue. It drew on her experiences coming of age during the First World War when she was in the Voluntary Aid Detachment working as a nurse in hospitals for injured servicemen – and of a doomed romance with an unnamed soldier who died during the battle of the Somme in 1916 (possibly a ‘dashing young officer’ in the Cameron Highlanders named Gordon Barber, according to Tey’s biographer).

After publication of the two novels, the next period of Tey’s life was dominated by the stage: in 1932, Richard of Bordeaux ran to acclaim at the Arts Theatre – making a name of Gielgud – before transferring to the New Theatre for a year-long run. Two more historical plays followed, The Laughing Woman and Queen of Scots, in 1934, the former having a run on Broadway two years later.

Tey’s second Grant book, A Shilling for Candles, about the suspected suicide of a film actress, did not appear until 1936. The book was quickly optioned by Alfred Hitchcock, who understood that it was a first novel – since it was the first published under the Tey name – and described its author as ‘a mystery woman’, adding: ‘I have not seen her, although I have asked her to collaborate with me on the script… Her publishers have not seen her.’ A Shilling for Candles drew on Tey’s short-lived experience as a screenwriter – it would appear that she preferred going to see films than writing them – and publication of it under the Tey name (she believed it to be a surname of an English ancestor on her maternal side) may have been down to a desire to compartmentalise her more literary fiction from her mystery writing. When A Shilling for Candles reached the screen it would be Young and Innocent and, according to Jennifer Morag Henderson, ranks among Hitchcock’s favourite films of his British career.

In the late 1930s Tey experienced a wobble in her career: she published a revisionist biography, Claverhouse, of the Scottish aristocrat, soldier and Jacobite, John Graham – but her newest play, The Stars Bow Down, was still unperformed by the time the Second World War broke out.

The war would upset the world as she knew it. By its end, cinema would eclipse theatre as the cultural lodestar – and the passage of time would usher in a younger generation of writers, actors and dramatists. Tey, who wrote radio plays during the war, continued to write drama but increasingly turned her hand to books. Mrs Pym Disposes, a crime story set against the backdrop of a physical training college not dissimilar to the one Tey herself attended after leaving school, landed in 1946 and was followed by The Franchise Affair. Then came Brat Farrer (1949), a standalone story of imposture – one drawing on Tey’s love of equestrianism and inspired by a Tichborne case from the 1870s. Here, once again, she created an uncertain, suspenseful world where reality, fact and illusions and self-delusions are in evidence. To Love and Be Wise, a third book in which Grant was the protagonist, landed in 1950. It saw the detective embroiled in a missing person inquiry in the fictional English village of Salcott St Mary, one colonised by London theatrical and artistic types with unconventional lifestyles – inspired by Tey’s visits to Essex to see friends including Gielgud, the novelist Dodie Smith (best remembered today as the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians of 1956), and the actress Marda Vanne, who would be the model of Marta Hallard, a character in the book as well as the next Grant outing, 1951’s The Daughter of Time.

It is this book, which it has been observed, that reveals more of Tey than any other. Certainly the wit is lively – especially between Grant, laid up in hospital after breaking his leg in pursuit of a felon, and his glamorous actress friend Marta Hallard, and makes one imagine what it would have been like to be in her company. It is Hallard who brings Grant some historical pictures to look at, since she knows the pleasure and pride he takes in studying faces, and being able to spot a criminal. We are told:

Grant’s interest in faces had remained and enlarged until it became a conscious study. It was, as he had said, not possible to put faces into any kind of category, but it was possible to characterise individual faces. In a reprint of a famous trial, for instance, where photographs of the principal actors in the case were displayed for the public’s interest, there was never any doubt as to which was the accused and which the judge. Occasionally, one of the counsel might on looks have changed places with the prisoner in the dock – counsel were after all a mere cross-section of humanity, as liable to passion and greed as the rest of the world, but a judge had a special quality; an integrity and a detachment. So, even without a wig, one did not confuse him with the man in the dock, who had had neither integrity nor detachment.

Among the historic portraits is one of Richard III, an image which baffles Grant because he cannot see in it the face of a man who would do all the things that Shakespeare accused him of, not least murdering his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. In a remarkably unconventional mystery, then, Grant begins to work through the documentary evidence from the 1480s and after, applying police methodology until he comes up with an alarming and dramatic hypothesis to the disappearance of the princes. Published six or so months before Tey died in February 1952, the book was a hit. Like Richard of Bordeaux, which sought – as she saw it – to correct a version of Richard II offered by Shakespeare, so Tey aimed to rescue Richard III’s tarnished reputation from the Bard’s onslaught. To say that her book was a success is an understatement. It is still in print, and was finally staged this summer in an adaptation by the American playwright M. Kilburg Reedy at London’s Charing Cross Theatre, receiving strong reviews.

Back in 1952, just as Tey was getting the wind into her sails for her second career as grand dame of crime writing, illness struck. Her death, of liver cancer, came rapidly, as she raced to finish her final Grant mystery, The Singing Sands. Published posthumously in 1952, it is a masterpiece that once again focuses on Tey’s preferred themes – human character and the point on the horizon where reality and illusion meet.

The sadness is that Tey died aged 55 just as her courteous and perceptive detective was going stratospheric. It’s probable that her relatively early death denied her a rightful place among the elite pantheon of so-called ‘Queens’ of the Golden Age of crime fiction – namely Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and, of course, Agatha Christie, who wrote  66 crime novels and lived until 85, dying in 1976. More than this, it would have been fascinating to see where Tey’s pen and her ingenious mind would have taken her. As it stands, a headline from the Scots newspaper, The Herald, from 2022 rather seems to sum it up: ‘Josephine Tey,’ it declared, ‘the best crime writer you’ve never heard of.’ Quite possibly. And it’s high time that changed.