The Daughter of Time is the first Josephine Tey mystery that I've made it through. The author was recommended to me last year when I visited a used bookstore in Marquette, MI. As I was checking out, my arms full of P.D. James and Ngaio Marsh, the clerk asked if I enjoyed British mysteries. Well, obviously. But she was kind enough to recommend another author that I might enjoy, and she wrote Tey's name on the back of the free bookmark that the store gave out to customers. Tey's not easy to find, and the one book that I grabbed in the library a while back just didn't do much for me. I think it just wasn't the right time, and I made the mistake of dismissing the author as one I wouldn't enjoy.
I'm glad I gave her a second chance. This book absolutely captivated me. I picked it up on Wednesday, thinking I would spend Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday reading it. I finished it on Wednesday. I couldn't put it down. Forget everything else. I shut myself in the bedroom, curled up in the new armchair, and gave myself over to a really fascinating story.
The premise is fairly unique, at least when compared to others mysteries that I've read. Inspector Alan Grant (Tey's primary "mystery-solving" character who appears in several of her books) is laid up in the hospital with a broken leg. His friends stop by to drop off a selection of silly novels that don't interest him, and he is getting more and more irritated by the day. At last, one of his friends stumbles on the idea that he should try to solve a mystery from the past -- way in the past -- and she brings him a collection of prints with the faces of various people from history. As he goes through them, he becomes fixated on the image of Richard III, the humpback king accused of murdering his nephews, the so-called Princes in the Tower. Grant is a man who enjoys a fascinating face, and he has a knack for being able to identify a person's character from his face. But he seems to get it all wrong with Richard. Far from being a cold-blooded monster, the king appears to Grant to be a man torn by the problems that he faces -- sad, slightly depressed, consumed by a distant problem, perhaps even remorseful about something. But Grant does not see a heartless man driven by greed and the desire to rule. Here is the picture:
This might seem like nothing, as though Grant just got it wrong, but it rankles at him. He starts showing the image to others: the nurses who are taking care of him, the doctor who stops by to check on his progress, the sergeant who visits to keep him apprised of what's going on in the police world. All of them come to a similar conclusion. The picture is that of a man who has faced a great deal of wrong, but no one pegs him for what history has labeled him. This is enough to get Grant's investigative engines going. He requests history books to see what he can find out about Richard III. He starts reviewing them closely and discovers that there are anomalies he did not expect, anomalies that seem to have been brushed aside over time. His friend who brought him the prints recommends a student she knows who is studying at the British Museum, and Grant enlists the young man's aid in tracking down historical fact. Grant decides to dispense with the history books and start looking at the actual records -- those details mentioned in historical chronicles, legal documents, even account books -- to see what they reveal. And together, Grant and his new friend try to solve a very old mystery.
I know I mentioned this before, but I enjoyed this immensely. It's worth noting that Tey's conclusions are not exactly the same as history's, that historians seem pretty confident about the traditional story. But then again, this is part of Tey's point in the book. Over time, the tales of history become rather fixed, and when you try to budge them with ideas that undermine the tradition and suggest other options people begin to dig in their heels. For instance, it always amazes me how quickly Shakespeare scholars are to claim that he was definitely, without a doubt just some really clever guy, with a limited education but a quick mind, from Stratford-upon-Avon. I'm not saying he wasn't, but there are a lot of holes in the story that get glossed over in a hurry. And when you persist in bringing them up, you get a pretty huffy response, followed by the suggestion that you must be some kind of renegade literary scholar. (Speaking from experience here.)
My point is that just because a story has been told a certain way for a really long time doesn't mean it's true. It's just means it's accepted as being true, and that isn't the same thing. Tey brings this home in The Daughter of Time, and she makes what seems to me to be a really strong case for an alternative to the story of Richard III (as he has always been portrayed). After all, Churchill's comment, "History is written by the victors," has a great deal of truth in it. In some cases, our first question shouldn't be, what happened, but rather, who's telling us about what happened.
Year of publication: 1951
Number of pages: 206
