The Daughter of Time

This real-life detective story intrigued and perplexed me in equal measure and still does every time I read it.

Was Richard III really the evil monster of Shakespeare’s play who killed the little Princes in the tower or the monarch who, in the three short years of his reign, introduced the bail system, attacked corruption, and set up hospitals?

This clever novel, featuring Tey’s detective hero investigating Richard’s history and character, led me to investigate another mystery, that of the Shakespeare Authorship Question. 

Tey spins a great yarn about how the past keeps its claws in us, whether it’s unravelling a historic mystery (in this case the Princes in the Tower) or uncovering the truth about a past crime because of a present one (as in my favourite Tey, Brat Farrar, which unfortunately has a cousin-romance storyline that isn’t terrible palatable, though easy to ignore).

Daughter of Time takes an incisive look at how the evidence we pick, put together, and ignore changes the story we tell about real events; interpretation is an art, not a science, and socio-political pressures – and powerful… show more.

Tey’s fictional detective, Alan Grant, takes a revisionist view of the villainy, immortalized by Shakespeare, of Richard III. Grant is laid up in bed and decides to plumb history for a case; in other words, this is a kind of literary Rear Window. As someone who has taught Richard III many times, I found it to be a refreshing shift in my understanding of the character.

In Josephine Tey’s classic novel, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III. Grant determines to find out who Richard III really was and who killed the Princes in the Tower. Published in 1951, Tey’s novel is a page-turner of the highest order and has never been out of print. 

This was one of the first books I ever read that forced me to re-evaluate the way I look at history. It was recommended to me by my teacher when I was fourteen. In it, Josephine Tey examines the death of the Princes in the Tower during the reign of Richard III and comes to some startling conclusions. But it’s not a dry, historical tome. On the contrary, she uses the device of a detective using modern investigative techniques to examine the evidence. He comes to some startling conclusions and so will you if you read the book. Up yours… show more.

Tey’s Inspector Grant is laid up in the hospital and his girlfriend, desperate to keep him entertained and running out of ideas, has the brilliant idea of supplying him with photographs and portraits of famous people from the past. His task is to identify them solely from their faces, a skill he prides himself upon. One of the faces really intrigues him. He thinks the man is great and good—a saint, perhaps. When he turns the picture over to read the name on the back, to his amazement it is Richard III. He demands his long-suffering girlfriend to bring him… show more.

A classic novel that explores whether Richard III was responsible for the murder of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. Tey tries to show readers that the case against the vilified king isn’t as open and shut as we may assume. Although this novel is a bit dated (given that it was published over 70 years ago), it is still an interesting “who done it?” 

I found a copy of this book at my grandmother’s house (where I found much to nurture my love of British history) and read it when I was in my early teens. It was… show more.

This novel’s focus on Shakespeare’s Richard III makes the playwright ever-present though he doesn’t appear in person. It’s a mystery story featuring a hospitalized police detective and a bright young American whose research into the historical Richard questions his being a villainous hunchback who murders the two princes in the Tower. In my own work I too like secrets and revelations; the way Tey builds her story is instructive. When the policeman opens a novel about Richard’s mother Cecily Neville, he comments that it’s ‘the almost-respectable form of historical fiction, which is history-with-conversation, so to speak  . . . an… show more.