The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey  - first published in 1951

My niece Katharine who lives and works in Paris came down to St Vaast for the weekend bearing books.  Amongst these was a copy of The Daughter of Time.  An introduction to Josephine Tey for me.

Synopsis:
Richard III reigned for only two years, and for centuries he was villified as the hunch-backed wicked uncle, murderer of the princes in the Tower. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time is an investigation into the real facts behind the last Plantagenet king's reign, and an attempt to right what many believe to be the terrible injustice done to him by the Tudor dynasty.

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 the Tudors?

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 III really was and who killed the Princes in the Tower.

There is a very good page in Wikipedia on the subject of this novel.  There is a summary of Grant's case for the innocence of Richard III.  Much has probably been written since Tey published in 1951 on the probability of Richard's guilt.  Winston Churchill evidently did not give much credence to Tey's theories as propounded via her protagonist Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard.

This is the portrait around which the novel is written: 

What I wrote to my niece:

Hi Kat

I thought I'd just drop you a quick line to say that I finished the Tey, a little while back, and I thought it was very cleverly constructed and obviously received many plaudits but I struggled with a detective story approach to the Two Princes. I am sure it was quite something when she published it and I wonder what academic studies have been carried out since to try and solve the mystery.  For example in Tey she seems to refute that Richard III had a deformed back but I thought that this was one of the things that helped solve the mystery of the 'skeleton in the Leicester carpark'.  That and the DNA.   I love the detective genre but here in the Tey I knew there would not be a definitive outcome.  However I would like to read a 'proper' Tey thriller (if you see what I mean) so I have ordered the Franchise Affair to await my return to the UK.  

In summary, I struggled with this book.  By and large I like a crime thriller, a whodunit, but this book somehow did not sit easily in that genre for me, despite the accolades the novel has received over the years.  The novel is listed as number one on the CWA's Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list and number four on the MWA's Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list.