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The Daughter of Time

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Format: Hardcover


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Voted the top crime novel of all time by the UK Crime Writer’s Association, The Daughter of Time is Josephine Tey’s last and most successful book. Complete and unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Inspector Alan Grant is laid up in hospital with a spinal injury and he’s bored. Renowned for his ability to read a face, he passes the time looking at old portraits and one which particularly grabs his attention is of Richard III, the supposed arch villain who killed his own nephews, ‘the princes in the tower’ But Grant doesn’t accept the face in the portrait is the face of a villain so he sets out to investigate what really happened. An unusual premise for a crime novel perhaps, but nevertheless an extremely clever and engrossing one, brilliantly plotted and written with enormous charm and erudition. Read more


Publisher ‏ : ‎ Macmillan Collector's Library (August 1, 2023)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1529090350


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 52


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.1 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 3.95 x 0.6 x 6.2 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #171,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1,105 in Traditional Detective Mysteries (Books) #3,415 in Classic Literature & Fiction #7,407 in Literary Fiction (Books)


#1,105 in Traditional Detective Mysteries (Books):


#3,415 in Classic Literature & Fiction:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • A very good read!
osephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time is the fifth in a series of mysteries featuring inspector Alan Grant. The book is perhaps best known for the praise it received from mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher, who called it one of the best mysteries of all time. That’s high praise to live up to, but the author began the book with higher aims than most mystery writers ever aspire to, and she made it clear in the first chapter that she wasn’t going to follow the traditional path to achieve them. 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. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2019 by A. Diamond
    • The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey: A review
I first read The Daughter of Time long ago in my callow youth. I can't recall much about that first reading experience. I don't think it made much of an impression on me. I was not well-versed in English history and knew little of the Plantagenets, the Wars of the Roses, or the Tudors except what I had gleaned from Shakespeare, so there was very little background for my understanding of what Josephine Tey was doing with this novel. Since that long ago time, I have read dozens of books about that period of history, especially during the past couple of years when it has been something of an obsession of mine. The result is that I'm now much better equipped to follow Tey's plot and the reasoning of her protagonist Inspector Alan Grant. When I ran across a reference to her book recently, I was intrigued and decided it was time to read it again. I'm very glad that I did. The plot of the book is that Inspector Alan Grant has been seriously injured in a fall while chasing a miscreant and is now bedridden in the hospital with a broken leg and injuries to his spine. He must lie flat on his back. He is extremely bored. In order to divert him, his friends have been bringing him piles of books, but he can't get interested in them. One of his friends, an actress, knowing of his fascination with faces, brings him pictures of several historical figures who have mysteries attached to them. Most of the pictures do not pique his interest, but finally one of them does capture his imagination. It is a copy of the famous portrait of Richard III. Grant knows little about Richard III except what he remembers from Shakespeare which is, basically, that he killed his two nephews, the "Princes in the Tower," and that he died on Bosworth Field calling for a horse, but, as a student of faces and one whose career depends on being able to read faces, he begins to doubt, while studying the portrait of Richard, that this man was a murderer. He determines to conduct an investigation, four hundred years after the fact, to determine the accuracy of the charges against the man. His actress friend is delighted to have found something that will occupy Grant's mind and distract him from his predicament. What he needs is someone to do research for him and she happens to know just the person, a young American friend of hers who has an interest in history. Soon he is introduced to Brent Carradine and the two form an alliance and a working partnership in search of the truth. The two pore over history books and historical accounts of events of the late 15th century, but they soon discover that the most famous accounts of the period - that of Sir Thomas More, for example - were not contemporaneous but were actually written later, during the Tudor period. Since the Tudors were mortal enemies of Richard, can their accounts really be trusted? Grant, the consummate detective, doesn't think so. At length, the two investigators find that none of the reports that were actually written during the time of Richard's life refer to the death of the two princes and that there is evidence that the mother of the two remained in a friendly relationship with Richard and that her daughters continued to attend events at his court. None of that seems to be the action of a mother or a family who considered Richard to be the murderer of their sons and brothers. Grant and Carradine come to the conclusion that the princes were, in fact, still alive in the Tower throughout Richard's reign. So, what happened to them? Were they killed, and, if so, who killed them? Grant decides to follow the clues, as he would in any murder investigation, to try to uncover the culprit. The first question he asks is, who stood to gain from the princes' death? It wouldn't have been Richard, since after his brother Edward IV's death, Parliament had declared his children with Elizabeth Woodville as illegitimate because there had been an earlier, undissolved marriage with another woman. But there were other children, those of his brother George, who stood ahead of Richard in line to become king, and yet those children continued to live and thrive. After Richard's death, Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, rescinded all of that and made the Woodville children legitimate again because he wished to marry the oldest of them, the young Elizabeth. In short order, he also sent the children's mother (his mother-in-law) to a convent to live out her days. He also began to systematically rid the government and the aristocracy of the various Woodville relatives who had permeated it during the Yorkist reigns. No mention is made of the princes. Grant forms the theory that it was Henry who caused the princes to be killed since, by the order of succession, the older one would have been legitimately seen as king and would have provided a rallying point for his enemies. He sent the princes' mother to a convent so that she would be out of the way and have no means of protesting. He then purged other members of the extensive family. Tey, through Grant, lays out a very plausible case for her theory. She was not the only one who believed Richard innocent. Throughout the more than 450 years since Richard lived and died, there have been loyal groups in Britain who have continued to believe that he had been falsely maligned and to work to rehabilitate his reputation. Tey's book, which was published in 1951, influenced that movement and convinced many to join it. Such has been the far-reaching influence of this unique murder mystery. This was a work of fiction, of course, and yet it offered a fascinating journey through English history. It also gives us a study of a high-minded obsession, as well, as Grant becomes thoroughly convinced of the falsity of the charge against the accused and he is determined to prove him innocent and bring the guilty to justice. It is, after all, what he does. Some have noted the obvious relationship between this story and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Since the movie came a few years after the publication of the popular book, it is possible that Hitchcock was influenced by it. Certainly, the obsession of a wheelchair-bound James Stewart with the activities of his neighbors that he is able to view from his window is comparable to the obsession of the bedridden Grant with the idea of balancing the scales of history. Most likely we will never know with one hundred percent certainty what happened in the Tower of London long ago, but Josephine Tey through Alan Grant at least makes a strong argument for reasonable doubt about the guilt of Richard III and she makes us hungry to read more about that period. Yes, my obsession continues. Sixty-four years have passed since the publication of this book, which has been voted number one among the top 100 British murder mysteries, and archaeology has added to Richard's story. A few years ago, his remains were found near Bosworth Field where he had been hastily buried after the battle. After excavation and confirmation of his identity, those remains were reburied with full honors and great ceremony at Leicester Cathedral, with the service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and royalty in attendance. Truth may be the daughter of time, but irony is its son. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2015 by PlantBirdWoman

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