It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don’t want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn’t it.
Oh, it’s been a hot minute since I wrote a review here. Life hit hard over the past year + change, with a diagnosis for fatigue I’d been just powering through for who knows how long, culminating in surgery right before the broader holiday season. And then coming back to work while still recovering! So that’s where I’ve been. I have been reading a shit-ton, as usual, just not writing reviews.
But I’m on spring break right now, and starting to feel like I have actual energy again, plus I read Josephine Tey’s The 
Daughter of Time, and in what’s news to almost nobody, this classic of the murder mystery genre is, in fact, an absolute banger. Honestly, I bought this book almost a year ago, and only just got around to reading it over the first couple days of break, at which point I slammed through it all in 48 hours because it’s that kind of pleasurable read.
The premise is simple: Inspector Alan Grant (the detective who stars in most of Tey’s novels) is laid up in hospital with a spinal injury after chasing a subject in a recent case. He will be fine, but recovery is boring him senseless and sending him into the doldrums. Perhaps funniest part in this opening sequence is Grant contemplating all the newly published novels that friends have sent to divert him while he’s in hospital, a hilarious send-up of the publishing industry of the day, ranging from romance to social problem fiction to a comedy of manners to a hard-boiled crime novel, etc, all of which are flawlessly parodied. It culminates in Grant complaining, “There are… far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It’s a horrible thought.” His nurse phlegmatically responds, “You sound constipated.”
Grant’s misery is relieved when his actress friend brings him a variety of prints of famous portraits, and Grant develops an obsession with a portrait of Richard III, the English monarch most famous for allegedly murdering his brother’s children, the princes in the tower.
Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face.
He turned the portrait over to look for a caption.
On the back was printed: Richard the Third. From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Artist Unknown.
Grant decides it’s not the face of a criminal, and from there, his bedridden investigation begins: did Richard really murder his nephews? With the help of a lovelorn young American scholar, young Carradine, he embarks on his private quest to either condemn or clear the villainized Richard.
The novel is a delicious subversion of the standard murder mystery: the victims are long-dead, as is the perpetrator, and any potential witnesses. Yet Grant, pursuing his research in the manner of a detective rather than an academic, pierces to the heart of the story. What could Richard’s motive have been? What are the contemporary testimonies to his character and rein? When did the rumor of his perfidy first circulate? Tey will have you questioning the narrative you received.
This story could be potentially so dry: Grant and Carradine are just combing through historical records and piecing together what they find to construct their narrative of the crime (or lack thereof). And yet Tey makes them both so engaged in it, and presents this cold case as a matter of fundamental justice, in such a way that I was completely swept along with it. Justice for Richard III! This was Tey’s fifth novel with Inspector Grant, and her tenth overall, so there’s also the feel of being in the hands of a master of narrative: no words are wasted (my copy was a lean 206 pages), and everything ties together smoothly in the end, just in time for Grant to be discharged from the hospital and begin a new case.
If you are a historian and you read this, be prepared to catch some strays, because Alan Grant is not impressed by you: “That is why historians 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.” But Tey makes her historical figures three-dimensional, and makes history an intimate family story as well as an engrossing mystery.
