Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time

"Truth is the daughter of time."

-Old proverb

Inspector Alan Grant is stuck in hospital after he fell through a trap door in pursuit of a criminal. For now, he can do nothing but lie on his back and look at the ceiling. Nurses, friends, acquaintances bring him flowers, sweets, books to pass the time. None of them particularly engage.

One friend, more astute than the rest, brings him portraits of historical criminals. These portraits include King Richard III, famous for supposedly murdering his nephews, the 'Princes in the Tower.' Grant thinks, that doesn't look like a murderer's face, and becomes interested in the evidence for King Richard's guilt. He gets his friends to bring him a bunch of history books, and eventually Brent Carradine, a researcher. Grant applies his Scotland Yard techniques to working out a solution, while Carradine gathers the evidence.

Now all I know about the case comes from Shakespeare's Richard III: there Richard's a thorough-going villain, and the ghosts of all of the people he'd unjustly killed gather round his bed the night before Bosworth Field and chant, "Tomorrow in the battle think on me." I was prepared to believe he didn't kill his nephews. It turns out Shakespeare got his information from Sir Thomas More, still a child at the time of the supposed murders, and later a partisan of the Tudors, at least until he wasn't. If you've read Hilary Mantel, you'll have no problem imagining More as untrustworthy, but in Tey he's the 'sainted' Thomas More, and Grant has some convincing to do.

Would it be a spoiler to reveal Grant's solution? Well, I won't. Tey, in the person of Grant, makes a pretty good case, but not perfectly convincing. Her evidence amounts to cui bono, who benefits--that was the best part for me--but also she makes considerable use of the absence of evidence. (If X happened, Y should have happened, but there's no record of Y. But the events were in the 1400s. There may just be no record any more.) Still very enjoyable. It would have helped if I'd known more about the period.

It's a celebrated novel--and justly so. Though the British Crime Writer's Association voted it the best mystery of all time in 1990 and that seems a little excessive. (Not The Maltese Falcon, The Murder on the Orient Express, The Hound of the Baskervilles!?!) But it is certainly a classic mystery...

 

For the challenge I'll go with:

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Castle or Ruin. The Tower of London is about as classic a castle as you can find.