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The Daughter of Time, Book Cover May Vary Paperback – November 29, 1995
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Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history. Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world’s most heinous villains—a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother’s children to make his crown secure? Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the usurpers of England’s throne? Grant determines to find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar, what kind of man Richard Plantagenet really was and who killed the Little Princes in the Tower.
The Daughter of Time is an ingeniously plotted, beautifully written, and suspenseful tale, a supreme achievement from one of mystery writing’s most gifted masters.
- Print length206 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateNovember 29, 1995
- Dimensions5.25 x 0.6 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100684803860
- ISBN-13978-0684803869
- Lexile measure820L
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Boston Sunday Globe The unalloyed pleasure of watching a really cultivated mind in action! Buy and cherish!
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed around a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity. Why didn't he read? she asked. Why didn't he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on bringing him?
"There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought."
"You sound constipated," said The Midget.
The Midget was Nurse Ingham, and she was in sober fact a very nice five-feet-two, with everything in just proportion. Grant called her The Midget to compensate himself for being bossed around by a piece of Dresden china which he could pick up in one hand. When he was on his feet, this is to say. It was not only that she told him what he might or might not do, but she dealt with his six-feet-odd with an off-hand ease that Grant found humiliating. Weights meant nothing, apparently, to The Midget. She tossed mattresses around with the absent-minded grace of a plate spinner. When she was off duty he was attended to by The Amazon, a goddess with arms like the limb of a beech tree. The Amazon was Nurse Darroll, who came from Gloucestershire and was homesick each daffodil season. (The Midget came from Lytham St. Anne's, and there was no daffodil nonsense about her.) She had large soft hands and large soft cow's eyes and she always looked very sorry for you, but the slightest physical exertion set her breathing like a suction-pump. On the whole Grant found it even more humiliating to be treated as a dead weight than to be treated as if he were no weight at all.
Grant was bed-borne, and a charge on The Midget and The Amazon, because he had fallen through a trap-door. This, of course, was the absolute in humiliation; compared with which the heavings of The Amazon and the light slingings of The Midget were a mere corollary. To fall through a trap-door was the ultimate in absurdity; pantomimic, bathetic, grotesque. At the moment of his disappearance from the normal level of perambulation he had been in hot pursuit of Benny Skoll, and the fact that Benny had careened round the next corner slap into the arms of Sergeant Williams provided the one small crumb of comfort in an intolerable situation.
Benny was now "away" for three years, which was very satisfactory for the lieges, but Benny would get time off for good behaviour. In hospitals there was no time off for good behaviour.
Grant stopped staring at the ceiling, and slid his eyes sideways at the pile of books on his bedside table; the gay expensive pile that The Midget had been urging on his attention. The top one, with the pretty picture of Valetta in unlikely pink, was Lavinia Fitch's annual account of a blameless heroine's tribulations. In view of the representation of the Grand Harbour on the cover, the present Valerie or Angela or Cecile or Denise must be a naval wife. He had opened the book only to read the kind message that Lavinia had written inside.
The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.
Under the harsh shadows and highlights of Silas's jacket was an elegant affair of Edwardian curlicues and Baroque nonsense, entitled Bells on Her Toes. Which was Rupert Rouge being arch about vice. Rupert Rouge always seduced you into laughter for the first three pages. About Page Three you noticed that Rupert had learned from that very arch (but of course not vicious) creature George Bernard Shaw that the easiest way to sound witty was to use that cheap and convenient method, the paradox. After that you could see the jokes coming three sentences away.
The thing with a red gun-flash across a night-green cover was Oscar Oakley's latest. Toughs talking out of the corners of their mouths in synthetic American that had neither the wit nor the pungency of the real thing. Blondes, chromium bars, breakneck chases. Very remarkably bunk.
The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener, by John James Mark, had three errors of procedure in the first two pages, and had at least provided Grant with a pleasant five minutes while he composed an imaginary letter to its author.
He could not remember what the thin blue book at the bottom of the pile was. Something earnest and statistical, he thought. Tsetse flies, or calories, or sex behaviour, or something.
Even in that, you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about "a new Silas Weekley" or "a new Lavinia Fitch" exactly as they talked about "a new brick" or "a new hairbrush." They never said "a new book by" whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.
It might be a good thing, Grant thought as he turned his nauseated gaze away from the motley pile, if all the presses of the world were stopped for a generation. There ought to be a literary moratorium. Some Superman ought to invent a ray that would stop them all simultaneously. Then people wouldn't send you a lot of fool nonsense when you were flat on your back, and bossy bits of Meissen wouldn't expect you to read them.
He heard the door open, but did not stir himself to look. He had turned his face to the wall, literally and metaphorically.
He heard someone come across to his bed, and closed his eyes against possible conversation. He wanted neither Gloucestershire sympathy nor Lancashire briskness just now. In the succeeding pause a faint enticement, a nostalgic breath of all the fields of Grasse, teased his nostrils and swam about his brain. He savoured it and considered. The Midget smelt of lavender dusting powder, and The Amazon of soap and iodoform. What was floating expensively about his nostrils was L'Enclos Numéro Cinq. Only one person of his acquaintance used L'Enclos Number Five. Marta Hallard.
He opened an eye and squinted up at her. She had evidently bent over to see if he was asleep, and was now standing in an irresolute way -- if anything Marta did could be said to be irresolute -- with her attention on the heap of all too obviously virgin publications on the table. In one arm she was carrying two new books, and in the other a great sheaf of white lilac. He wondered whether she had chosen white lilac because it was her idea of the proper floral offering for winter (it adorned her dressing-room at the theatre from December to March) or whether she had taken it because it would not detract from her black-and-white chic. She was wearing a new hat and her usual pearls; the pearls which he had once been the means of recovering for her. She looked very handsome, very Parisian, and blessedly unhospital-like.
"Did I waken you, Alan?"
"No. I wasn't asleep."
"I seem to be bringing the proverbial coals," she said, dropping the two books alongside their despised brethren. "I hope you will find these more interesting than you seem to have found that lot. Didn't you even try a little teensy taste of our Lavinia?"
"I can't read anything."
"Are you in pain?"
"Agony. But it's neither my leg nor my back."
"What then?"
"It's what my cousin Laura calls 'the prickles of boredom.'"
"Poor Alan. And how right your Laura is." She picked a bunch of narcissi out of a glass that was much too large for them, dropped them with one of her best gestures into the washbasin, and proceeded to substitute the lilac. "One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing."
"Small nothing. It's like being beaten with nettles."
"Why don't you take up something?"
"Improve the shining hour?"
"Improve your mind. To say nothing of your soul and your temper. You might study one of the philosophies. Yoga, or something like that. But I suppose an analytical mind is not the best kind to bring to the consideration of the abstract."
"I did think of going back to algebra. I have an idea that I never did algebra justice, at school. But I've done so much geometry on that damned ceiling that I'm a little off mathematics."
"Well, I suppose it is no use suggesting jig-saws to someone in your position. How about cross-words. I could get you a book of them, if you like."
"God forbid."
"You could invent them, of course. I have heard that that is more fun than solving them."
"Perhaps. But a dictionary weighs several pounds. Besides, I always did hate looking up something in a reference book."
"Do you play chess? I don't remember. How about chess problems? White to play and mate in three moves, or something like that."
"My only interest in chess is pictorial."
"Pictorial?"
"Very decorative things, knights and pawns and whatnot. Very elegant."
"Charming. I could bring you along a set to play with. All right, no chess. You could do some academic investigating. That's a sort of mathematics. Finding a solution to an unsolved problem."
"Crime, you mean? I know all the case-histories by heart. And there is nothing more that can be done about any of them. Certainly not by someone who is flat on his back."
"I didn't mean something out of the files at the Yard. I meant something more -- what's the word? -- something classic. Something that has puzzled the world for ages."
"As what, for instance?"
"Say, the casket letters."
"Oh, not Mary Queen of Scots!"
"Why not?" asked Marta, who like all actresses saw Mary Stuart through a haze of white veils.
"I could be interested in a bad woman but never in a silly one."
"Silly?" said Marta in her best lower-register Electra voice.
"Very silly."
"Oh, Alan, how can you!"
"If she had worn another kind of headdress no one would ever have bothered about her. It's that cap that seduces people."
"You think she would have loved less greatly in a sunbonnet?"
"She never loved greatly at all, in any kind of bonnet."
Marta looked as scandalised as a lifetime in the theatre and an hour of careful make-up allowed her to.
"Why do you think that?"
"Mary Stuart was six feet tall. Nearly all out-size women are sexually cold. Ask any doctor."
And as he said it he wondered why, in all the years since Marta had first adopted him as a spare escort when she needed one, it had not occurred to him to wonder whether her notorious level-headedness about men had something to do with her inches. But Marta had not drawn any parallels; her mind was still on her favourite queen.
"At least she was a martyr. You'll have to allow her that."
"Martyr to what?"
"Her religion."
"The only thing she was a martyr to was rheumatism. She married Darnley without the Pope's dispensation, and Bothwell by Protestant rites."
"In a moment you'll be telling me she wasn't a prisoner!"
"The trouble with you is that you think of her in a little room at the top of a castle, with bars on the windows and a faithful old attendant to share her prayers with her. In actual fact she had a personal household of sixty persons. She complained bitterly when it was reduced to a beggarly thirty, and nearly died of chagrin when it was reduced to two male secretaries, several women, an embroiderer, and a cook or two. And Elizabeth had to pay for all that out of her own purse. For twenty years she paid, and for twenty years Mary Stuart hawked the crown of Scotland round Europe to anyone who would start a revolution and put her back on the throne that she had lost; or, alternatively, on the one Elizabeth was sitting on."
He looked at Marta and found that she was smiling.
"Are they a little better now?" she asked.
"Are what better?"
"The prickles."
He laughed.
"Yes. For a whole minute I had forgotten about them. That is at least one good thing to put down to Mary Stuart's account!"
"How do you know so much about Mary?"
par
"I did an essay about her in my last year at school."
"And didn't like her, I take it."
"Didn't like what I found out about her."
"You don't think her tragic, then."
"Oh, yes, very. But not tragic in any of the ways that popular belief makes her tragic. Her tragedy was that she was born a queen with the outlook of a suburban housewife. Scoring off Mrs. Tudor in the next street is harmless and amusing; it may lead you into unwarrantable indulgence in hire-purchase, but it affects only yourself. When you use the same technique on kingdoms the result is disastrous. If you are willing to put a country of ten million people in pawn in order to score off a royal rival, then you end by being a friendless failure." He lay thinking about it for a little. "She would have been a wild success as a mistress at a girls' school."
"Beast!"
"I meant it nicely. The staff would have liked her, and all the little girls would have adored her. That is what I meant about her being tragic."
"Ah, well. No casket letters, it seems. What else is there? The Man in the Iron Mask?"
"I can't remember who that was, but I couldn't be interested in anyone who was being coy behind some tinplate. I couldn't be interested in anyone at all unless I could see his face."
"Ah, yes. I forgot your passion for faces. The Borgias had wonderful faces. I should think they would provide a little mystery or two for you to dabble in if you looked them up. Or there was Perkin Warbeck, of course. Imposture is always fascinating. Was he or wasn't he? A lovely game. The balance can never come down wholly on one side or the other. You push it over and up it comes again, like one of those weighted toys."
The door opened and Mrs. Tinker's homely face appeared in the aperture surmounted by her still more homely and historic hat. Mrs. Tinker had worn the same hat since first she began to "do" for Grant, and he could not imagine her in any other. That she did possess another one he knew, because it went with something that she referred to as "me blue." Her "blue" was an occasional affair, in both senses, and never appeared at 19 Tenby Court. It was worn with a ritualistic awareness, and having been worn it was used in the event as a yardstick by which to judge the proceedings. ("Did you enjoy it, Tink? What was it like?" "Not worth putting on me blue for.") She had worn it to Princess Elizabeth's wedding, and to various other royal functions, and had indeed figured in it for two flashing seconds in a newsreel shot of the Duchess of Kent cutting a ribbon, but to Grant it was a mere report; a criterion of the social worth of an occasion. A thing was or was not worth putting on "me blue" for.
"I 'eard you 'ad a visitor," said Mrs. Tinker, "and I was all set to go away again when I thought the voice sounded familiar like, and I says to meself: 'It's only Miss Hallard,' I says, so I come in."
She was carrying various paper bags and a small tight bunch of anemones. She greeted Marta as woman to woman, having been in her time a dresser and having therefore no exaggerated reverence for the goddesses of the theatre world, and looked askance at the beautiful arrangement of lilac sprays that had blossomed under Marta's ministrations. Marta did not see the glance but she saw the little bunch of anemones and took over the situation as if it were something already rehearsed.
"I squander my vagabond's hire on white lilac for you, and then Mrs. Tinker puts my nose out of joint by bringing you the Lilies of the Field."
"Lilies?" said Mrs. Tinker, doubtfully.
"Those are the Solomon in all his glory things. The ones that toiled not, neither did they spin."
Mrs. Tinker went to church only for weddings and christenings, but she belonged to a generation that had been sent to Sunday school. She looked with a new interest at the little handful of glory incased by her woollen glove.
"Well, now. I never knew that. Makes more sense that way, don't it? I always pictured them arums. Fields and fields of arums. Awful expensive, you know, but a bit depressing. So they was coloured? Well, why can't they say so? What do they have to call them lilies for!"
And they went on to talk about translation, and how misleading Holy Writ could be ("I always wondered what bread on the waters was," Mrs. Tinker said) and the awkward moment was over.
While they were still busy with the Bible, The Midget came in with extra flower vases. Grant noticed that the vases were designed to hold white lilac and not anemones. They were tribute to Marta; a passport to further communing. But Marta never bothered about women unless she had an immediate use for them; her tack with Mrs. Tinker had been mere savoir faire; a conditioned reflex. So The Midget was reduced to being functional instead of social. She collected the discarded narcissi from the washbasin and meekly put them back into a vase. The Midget being meek was the most beautiful sight that had gladdened Grant's eyes for a long time.
"Well," Marta said, having finished her arrangement of the lilac and placed the result where he could see it, "I shall leave Mrs. Tinker to feed you all the titbits out of those paper bags. It couldn't be, could it, Mrs. Tinker darling, that one of those bags contains any of your wonderful bachelor's buttons?"
Mrs. Tinker glowed.
"You'd like one or two maybe? Fresh outa me oven?"
"Well, of course I shall have to do penance for it afterwards -- those little rich cakes are death on the waist -- but just give me a couple to put in my bag for my tea at the theatre."
She chose two with a flattering deliberation ("I like them a little brown at the edges"), dropped them into her handbag, and said: "Well, au revoir, Alan. I shall look in, in a day or two, and start you on a sock. There is nothing so soothing, I understand, as knitting. Isn't that so, Nurse?"
"Oh, yes, indeed. A lot of my gentlemen patients take to knitting. They find it whiles away the time very nicely."
Marta blew him a kiss from the door and was gone, followed by the respectful Midget.
"I'd be surprised if that hussy is any better than she ought to be," Mrs. Tinker said, beginning to open the paper bags. She was not referring to Marta.
Copyright 1951 by Elizabeth MacKintosh
Copyright renewed © 1979 by R. S. Lantham
Product details
- Publisher : Scribner; Reprint edition (November 29, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 206 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0684803860
- ISBN-13 : 978-0684803869
- Lexile measure : 820L
- Item Weight : 8.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.6 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #44,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #491 in Traditional Detective Mysteries (Books)
- #835 in Historical Mystery
- #1,965 in Police Procedurals (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Josephine Tey is one of the best-known and best-loved of all crime writers. She began to write full-time after the successful publication of her first novel, The Man in the Queue (1929), which introduced Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard. In 1937 she returned to crime writing with A Shilling for Candles, but it wasn't until after the Second World War that the majority of her crime novels were published. Josephine Tey died in 1952, leaving her entire estate to the National Trust.
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For starters, Tey’s detective is bedridden throughout the novel, laid up on his back in a hospital due to injuries he sustained on a prior case. Grant is suffering from an acute case of boredom. Even the novels piled at his bedside, the latest works of the fictional best-selling authors Silas Weekley and Lavinia Fitch, don’t interest him.
[quote] …you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekley” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never talked about “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like. [end quote]
This is another hint from the author that she won’t be presenting a run-of-the-mill mystery.
To help alleviate his boredom, Grant’s friend Marta Hallard, an actress on the London stage, brings him a series of portraits–prints from London bookshops–showing faces and figures from the distant past. As a police inspector, Grant is a reader of faces. He prides himself on his ability to divine from the face a sense of a person’s character, their virtues, vices, weaknesses and habits of mind.
One portrait in particular grabs his interest. He judges the man to be of strong integrity, good judgment, and solid character. The bottom of the print gives the subject’s name. Richard III, king of England from 1483 to 1485, one of the most reviled and vilified characters in all of history. This is the king who Sir Thomas More said murdered his young nephews–children who had been placed under his guardianship–in order to secure his claim to the throne. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard III is physically deformed, malevolent, and unconscionably evil.
Grant shows the portrait to a fellow homicide detective, one of his co-workers at Scotland Yard, and asks if he were to encounter this person in a courtroom, would he expect to see him in the dock or on the bench. His fellow detective replies that the man has the calm and conscientious face of a judge, and he would expect to see him on the bench.
Puzzled that two seasoned detectives have both come to the same reading of the King’s face, Grant decides to look further into the history of Richard III to figure out how a seemingly even-tempered and conscientious man could have conspired to murder his brother’s children in cold blood.
Grant enlists the help of his actress friend Marta and an American researcher, Brent Carradine, working at the British Museum, to conduct the entire investigation from his hospital bed. At this point, we’re already far from the traditional formula of detective fiction. There will be no tours of crime scenes, no chases or tense confrontations. If the story is going to adhere to any sub-genre, it will have to be a procedural, whereby our detective slowly pieces together what made a good man snap and do something horrible. How did the once able and well-respected administrator from York degenerate into the despicable monster portrayed by More and Shakespeare?
But even here, the book doesn’t go according to expectation. Grant impatiently (and correctly) dismisses the accounts of Shakespeare and Holinshed and Sir Thomas More as hearsay. Shakespeare got his story from Holinshed, who got it from More, who himself got it second-hand from a gossip several decades after the events transpired. The case they present, Grant notes, would not be admitted in court, because none of it was first hand, and all of the initial accounts came from unreliable sources who were not only hostile to Richard III, but had a vested interest in maligning him.
Grant notes that most of what constitutes real history is not the narratives historians have composed, but the artifacts left behind by ordinary people who weren’t intending to write history at all. Grant looks for the kind of evidence that detectives look for in present-day cases, the kind that does hold up in court. Things as simple as receipts in a merchant’s account book can show where a person was on a given date, whether they had money, and in cases where purchased items were to be delivered to a third party, evidence of a relationship between the buyer and the recipient.
Grant sets Brent Carradine back to the British Museum to dig up journals, letters, sermons, Parliamentary proceedings and more from the reigns of kings Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII. From these, he will piece together a compelling story of what actually happened to the two boys Richard is supposed to have murdered.
The story he comes up with, and the evidence he marshals in its favor, is vastly more convincing than the tales of More and Shakespeare, which have for centuries been accepted as fact. This is another twist on the traditional detective formula. Rarely does a procedural, after so clearly identifying the perpetrator, go on to thoroughly exonerate him.
Inspector Grant remarks several times throughout the story that a detective’s job is to understand how character, motive, psychology and circumstance guide behavior. The narrator notes that Grant’s friend Marta, the actress, has spent her career developing and refining an understanding of these same elements of human nature and experience. Brent Carradine, the researcher, remarks that his job is merely to uncover facts, not to supply commentary or interpretation (though he does some of that in his conversations with Grant).
The tangible evidence that Carradine digs up allows Grant to establish a timeline of events, a cast of characters, and a series of relationships. His analysis of character and motive, based solely on evidence, allows him to fill in some holes about who likely did what, and when, and why. As far afield as we seem to have gone from the detective novel formula, Grant winds up doing in the end exactly what we expect a detective to do: through a combination of evidence gathering, logical deduction, and shrewd psychological insight, he pieces together a coherent and convincing story.
So why does Boucher call this one of the best mysteries of all time? Probably because the author set herself the exceedingly difficult task of overturning a centuries-old conviction for one of history’s most infamous crimes, and then did an exceedingly good job in accomplishing her task. Keep in mind that the story of Richard III and his successor, Henry VII, was more than the standard intrigue of the king’s court. It was the brutal conclusion of thirty years of civil war that ended the Plantagenet dynasty and began 118 years of Tudor reign.
The title, by the way, comes from an old proverb. Truth is the daughter of time. Which is to say, you can lie all you want, but eventually the truth will come out. Especially when a dogged and capable detective is on the case.
This is one of those books that rewards you to the extent that you are willing to invest in it. If you just want to be entertained, you’ll find easier reading elsewhere. If you want to engage your mind and you’re willing to keep track of a large cast of historical characters and a great number of facts, you’ll like this.
At the end of the book, Inspector Grant revisits the tale of Richard III as it’s written in a children’s history book. Grant, who is well attuned to the subtleties and complexities of human nature, is disgusted by the black-and-white tale of malevolence and evil, simple and unequivocal, universally accepted and completely wrong. The actual story with all its complexities is more difficult to digest, and for that reason is unlikely to ever supplant the false story that centuries of repetition have led people to stop questioning.
The story that More and Shakespeare and the history books tell doesn’t hold up under interrogation, and Grant can’t hide his frustration with the supposedly learned historians who repeat it.
“Historians should be compelled to take a course in psychology,” Grant observes, “before they are allowed to write.” Elsewhere he “wondered with what part of their brains historians reasoned. It was certainly by no process of reasoning known to ordinary mortals that they arrived at their conclusions.”
In an earlier conversation with Marta Hallard, Grant remarks, “[H]istorians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow: with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.”
Marta replies, “Perhaps when you are grubbing about with tattered records you haven’t time to learn about people. I don’t mean about the people in the records, but just about People. Flesh and blood. And how they react to circumstances.”
The detective and the actress know that understanding the human element is essential to understanding any story about people. Brent Carrington puts in a final plug for the author when he says near the end, “A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn’t write history. He writes novels.”
Or a woman who is interested in what makes people tick. She writes really good novels.
I also think that THE DAUGHTER OF TIME is designed, like so many mysteries, to surprise the reader. If you open up the pages believing that Richard III is an evil murderer of children, woah, would you be shocked to have evidence presented bit by little bit to show that actually, he is most likely innocent of that crime and a wonderful, upstanding individual besides. Since I had hardly any notion of who the Princes in the Tower were, nor any ill opinion of Richard III, I felt no surprise.
THE DAUGHTER OF TIME is a really fun book, even though I had to keep my Wikipedia open to follow along. As in so many mysteries, our protagonist is a sleuth. A police inspector, Alan Grant, confined to bedrest after a bad accident. He investigates Richard III to pass the time, because a centuries-old cold case is the only kind he can take on from his hospital room, and Tey lays out the historical evidence the same way that Agatha Christie distributes clues. There are twists and turns, unexpected reversals. It's really satisfying to reach the last page and feel like untruths have been cleared away, answers found, a man's reputation vindicated.
I'm interested in reading more about the Wars of the Roses now, which I feel is a little backwards. Still, good read.