The Daughter Of Time: A gripping historical mystery

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Although slow in some chapters it tends to read like a history lesson, but very well done - would appeal to history buffs. This book takes a different angle and offers another villain that may have had more to gain from the boys' death. He is an inspector for Scotland Yard – an active man, relying on his brains and his brawn to help him solve cases.

I came across this first in my teens and it was one of those books which stayed with me, as one of my favourite books in the genre ‘Crime Fiction’ Probably because it wasn’t about fictional crime at all (but more, later) – I had a kind of squeam about loving descriptions of bludgeonings and hackings – but was about a historical mystery – so it might be, (it is! 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.Nothing new to us, perhaps, but a particularly fresh approach in 1951, when history was often venerated as fact, rather than the saga of the winners. Re-reading this marvellously entertainingly presented history lesson this time, forcefully struck me by its topicality. Using his detective's logic, he comes to the conclusion that the claim of Richard being a murderer is a fabrication of Tudor propaganda, as is the popular image of the King as a monstrous hunchback.

She uses a great device here – her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, of Scotland Yard, is laid up in bed, flat on his back – for weeks – in hospital, following a severely broken leg, falling through a trap-door, chasing a villain. With the help of other friends and acquaintances, Grant investigates Richard's life and the case of the Princes in the Tower, testing out his theories on the doctors and nurses who attend to him. He passed progressive legislation in Parliament, he wasn’t particularly vengeful to the opposition after taking power (though his Woodville in-laws might have disagreed), he didn’t try to make his bastard son heir to the throne, and lots of people said good things about him. In addition to certain standard Google cookies, reCAPTCHA sets a necessary cookie (_GRECAPTCHA) when executed for the purpose of providing its risk analysis. 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.

This book makes the top of many crime and mystery books lists, has received very high praise through the decades since its publication. So let's see, there's Richard, whose father was also Richard, and his brother Edward, whose sons were named Edward and (drum roll) Richard. I love books in which the characters get passionate and even a little obsessive about things, and Tey's Inspector Grant is nothing if not obsessive. He makes a good point about the simplified and often unsupported history presented in the school textbooks he reads, but much of his discussion involves setting up and knocking down straw men.

Josephine Tey and her two main characters, Alan Grant and Brent Carradine, take a forensic, Scotland Yard approach to the crime, and come up with the conclusion that most of the history books are wrong.The tangible evidence that Carradine digs up allows Grant to establish a timeline of events, a cast of characters, and a series of relationships. The book introduced her detective protagonist Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard, who would appear in a further five novels: A Shilling for Candles (1936), The Franchise Affair (1948), To Love and Be Wise (1950), The Daughter of Time (1951) and The Singing Sands (1952). If you take the "players" in The War of the Roses, and place them in more modern times- one could almost compare them to The Mob fighting for control of their territory.

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osephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time is the fifth in a series of mysteries featuring inspector Alan Grant.