Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of course, one of two used by Scottish writer Elizabeth or Beth MacIntosh throughout her life, and confusingly there was no clear separation between the Josephine Tey name and her other penname, Gordon Daviot. You only have to look at her bibliography to see how she stands apart from these other writers. Although Tey is generally acknowledged today to be a Queen of Crime and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, it feels like a grouping that we’ve created with hindsight, rather than one that necessarily existed at the time. And perhaps most importantly, she wasn’t often physically in the place where much of the meeting and mingling in British literary society went on. She didn’t work as a critic either, so she wasn’t reviewing other writers’ work or in a dialogue with them that way. She wasn’t a member of the Detection Club in the 1930s, so she was never part of that collective of crime writers who met regularly and collaborated on projects like round robin novels and radio broadcasts. I’ve always been fascinated by Josephine Tey because of how few traces there are of her among the general hubbub of the golden age of detective fiction. And that’s why today we’re heading north, to a city on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, where one of the most fascinating and elusive writers of the golden age spent the years of World War Two.

And while the UK’s capital city does loom large in the literary history of the time, it’s by no means the only place of interest to the curious crime fiction fan. So far in this series, we’ve spent time with writers who mostly saw out the war in London or in the south of England. This is another episode of Queens of Crime at War, a series looking at what the best writers from the golden age of detective fiction did once that period came to an end with the start of the Second World War.

Miss pym disposes author