07 May 2025

A Visit to Josephine Tey's Inverness

Dear listeners,

At the very start of the year, when the weather was an awful lot colder than it is now, I got to pay a visit to the birthplace and longtime home of Josephine Tey: Inverness.

My husband Guy and I, along with Morris the dog, were on the way back south to England after spending Christmas and New Year in Orkney. Ages ago, past Shedunnit guest and Inverness resident Jennifer Morag Henderson had offered to show me around if I was ever passing through, and luckily our diaries lined up in early January.

*The River Ness in all its almost-flooded January glory.*

I first spoke to Jennifer in 2021 for the episode from the Queens of Crime at War series titled Josephine Tey's Golden Age, which is all about the incredible run of novels Tey published in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was a tremendously productive period for her, as a simple list of titles and dates reveals:

I'm not so keen on To Love and Be Wise or The Singing Sands, but I think for any other writer, just one novel of the quality of Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar or The Daughter of Time would be considered a once-in-a-lifetime career highlight. And Tey produced four such books, all close together at the end of her life! Truly, so impressive.

I was a Tey fan long before I spoke to Jennifer, and I had keenly devoured her biography, Josephine Tey: A Life:

One of the things this book does well is to put Tey into context not just as a crime writer revered among the greats of the golden age of detective fiction, but as a Scottish writer of plays and other prose works, and a long-time resident of Inverness.

Inverness is a character in Jennifer's book, which is why it was all the more special to have her play tour guide for the afternoon and show us around her city (after an excellent lunch at the Victorian Market!). Fun fact: Jennifer is also a dedicated fan of the Chalet School series, which I discovered after I published a bonus episode on that subject last year. We had a great time chatting about her adventures in the Tyrol inspired by Jo and co.

Here we are, with Morris the dog, at the site of the Tey/MacKintosh family business on Castle Street:

*Caroline, Jennifer and Morris surveying the former site of the MacKintosh family business.*

Josephine Tey's real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, and her father Colin ran a greengrocer's shop here for most of his life. Jennifer was instrumental in getting the blue plaque erected in 2022.

After taking in the sights in the city centre, we climbed up the hill into the Crown neighbourhood, where plenty of Victorian and Edwardian housing still stands. We paused outside the former site of the Inverness Royal Academy on Midmills Road, where Josephine Tey went to school:

*The former Inverness Royal Academy on Midmills Road, now the Wasps Inverness Creative Academy.*

And we also got to peep at a house where she once lived, although it is now in private hands and it didn't seem right to photograph it any more closely. That's her roof, though!

It was a lovely, if quite cold, day. If you ever expect to find yourself in Inverness, I highly recommend perusing Jennifer's book and noting down some key Tey locations to explore.

Finally, I squeezed in a visit to one of my favourite secondhand bookshops: Leakey's.

Such riches!

Until next time,

Caroline

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