Kif

Josephine Tey's first novel, Archibald 'Kif' Vicar is an orphan, a country boy who grows to manhood in the hell of the trenches on the Western Front.

The war ends and Kif finds himself alone, homeless, penniless, without work. Until he meets Baba… wild, beautiful Baba, the sister of a criminal.

Driven by his passion for Baba, Kif embarks on a life of crime. And drifts, inevitably, towards his tragic end.

About the Author. Josephine Tey was the pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh, the Scottish author who rose to fame through her Inspector Alan Grant crime novels. Grant was a dogged and diligent Detective Inspector in the CID at Scotland Yard, and one of the first fictional detectives to be a Scotland Yard Police Officer.

Her first mystery novel, which also introduced Inspector Grant, The Man in the Queue, was published in 1929 and was awarded the Dutton Mystery Prize when published in America.

The Daughter of Time, the fifth Inspector Grant novel in the six book series, was named as the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association.

Rather unusually for such a successful Golden Age author, she never joined the illustrious Detection Club – probably because she delighted in subverting the conventions of the genre, thereby breaking the Clubs 'commandments'.

A shy and private person, she never married and eluded the attentions of biographers until 2015. Josephine Tey died in 1952, leaving her entire estate to the National Trust.