Tey published her first crime novel, The Man in the Queue, in 1929. Inspector Grant, its detective, who would feature in several more of her works, is one of the first professional sleuths to lead successful investigations. In most other crime fiction of the ‘Golden Age’, the sleuth is an amateur and their policeman counterpart is very often a bumbling incompetent.
Despite being private to the point of reclusiveness, Tey was drawn to the glamour of the stage. In 1933, writing under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot, she wrote a rich historical drama, Richard of Bordeaux, which launched the career of John Gielgud in the title role. The play revises Shakespeare’s portrait of a selfish, petulant monarch (Richard II) and presents the king as noble, sensitive and peace-loving. The play is now all but forgotten, but what survived and shaped a far more influential later work was Tey’s interest in alternative history.
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