FACT AND FICTION

Fact and fiction

‘To write fiction about historic fact is very nearly impermissible.’
Gordon Daviot, The Privateer

An Expert in Murder is a work of fiction, inspired by real lives and events.

Gordon Daviot was one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) during a versatile career as playwright and novelist; the other, Josephine Tey, was taken from her Suffolk great-great-grandmother and did not actually appear until 1936, with the publication of A Shilling for Candles. It was reserved for detective fiction, and is the name by which we know her best today.

By 1934, she had written a mystery and two other novels as Daviot, but it was Richard of Bordeaux which made her name and led to a number of important friendships and professional relationships. Mackintosh divided her time between London and her hometown, Inverness, where she looked after her father, and, when she died, she left the bulk of her considerable estate to The National Trust for England. The Josephine Tey who appears in An Expert in Murder mixes what we know about Elizabeth Mackintosh with the personality which emerges so strongly from her eight crime novels - novels which are loved for their warmth and originality by those who have discovered them, but which are still vastly underrated in comparison with the work of her contemporaries.

Richard of Bordeaux ran for 463 performances at the New Theatre (now the Noel Coward Theatre) in St Martin’s Lane, closing on 24 March, 1934. It took more than £100,000 at the box office under the management of Howard Wyndham and Bronson Albery, and acquired the sort of popularity that films enjoy today: hundreds of people went 30 or 40 times to see it; the cast took part in high-profile publicity stunts; commemorative portrait dolls were produced; and it turned its leading man, John Gielgud, from a brilliant young actor into a celebrity overnight. The beauty of the set and costumes, designed by ‘Motley’ (Margaret and Sophia Harris and Elizabeth Montgomery), was vital to the play’s success, as was Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies’s performance as Anne. Bordeaux toured provincial theatres and was produced on Broadway, but the overall experience was not entirely positive for its author: fame was unwelcome, particularly in Inverness, and, according to Gielgud, she was subject to unfair accusations of plagiarism which hurt her deeply. Gielgud’s own hopes for a film starring himself and Lillian Gish were never realised.

Daviot wrote many other plays – The Laughing Woman and Queen of Scots were produced at the New later in 1934 – but none were as successful as Bordeaux, whose humanity and romanticism struck a powerful chord in an audience haunted by one war and threatened by another. The war’s significance in the public response was a surprise even to the author: what she thought of as a tale of revenge, she admitted later, turned out to be a play about pacifism.

For an author who wrote several historical plays and novels, Elizabeth Mackintosh took a dim view of mixing fact and fiction - but she allowed it if the writer stated where the truth could be found, and if invention did not falsify the general picture. Readers wanting to know more about the real people involved in Richard of Bordeaux should consult Gielgud’s autobiographical writings, the biographies by Sheridan Morley and Jonathan Croall, and Michael Mullin’s Design by Motley. Murder, of course, does rather distort the general picture, but I hope that it won’t entirely eclipse a unique moment of theatrical history and the true beginning of a remarkable writing career.

Photograph of Josephine Tey courtesy of David Higham Associates

More on Josephine Tey and the real people behind some of the other characters coming soon.