A Great Mystery (If You Know Some History)

In 2012, The British Crime Writer's Association named The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey as the greatest mystery novel ever written.

I just read it. I loved it, but it's an odd choice.

First of all, It's an exponentially faster read than Tom Jones. But that's not saying much. I whipped through The Daughter of Time in three days. I'd like to highly recommend it, but for one thing.

To enjoy the book, you need to have a working knowledge of The War of the Roses, Richard III, The Lancasters and the Yorks, and all that. You don't need to be a historian, but you need to at least be familiar with the key players in the way Americans would be familiar with the main characters of Hamilton.

Despite this cultural caveat, The Mystery Writers of America list the book as the fourth-best mystery ever. That's impressive.

I was already prepped to read The Daughter of Time because I've taught Shakespeare's Richard III and Henry IV many times. I've learned to boil down that period of history to something palatable for high school kids in a fun elective class.  I've also watched the entire Hollow Crown series. So I knew just enough to really enjoy the novel.

It's bizarre, as far as mystery stories go. Tey's detective, Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, is confined to a hospital bed. He hurt his leg when he fell through a trapdoor during a police chase. He's bored and doesn't want to read the typical formulaic literature that people have been giving him, so he ends up investigating a historical mystery. He is constrained to his bed for the duration of the novel. All the action takes place in the 15th century.

He wonders if Richard of Gloucester-- who eventually becomes Richard III-- really murdered the two young princes in the Tower of London. It's one of the most famous mysteries in history. Shakespeare's version of the hunchbacked Machiavellian villain certainly orchestrated the foul deed (and many other deeds nearly as foul). But the real Richard is much more elusive.

Grant lies in hospital bed and various people bring him books and assist him in his research into the mystery. Tey's book is more a treatise on how history is written to reflect the biases of historians than a crime novel.

This is what Grant says about an author of one of the accounts:

The spectacle of Dr. Gairdner trying to make his facts fit his theory was the most entertaining thing in gymnastics that Grant had witnessed for some time.

Apparently, this debate over the culpability and villainy of Richard III has been up for debate ever since he was deposed by Henry VII. But it took Tey's novel to spark interest among the general public.

If you are going to read the book, you probably want to avoid reading any historical debate over the answers. And even if you know nothing about the history of the Lancaster and the Yorks, you could probably follow along. The research goes step-by-step.

Grant begins his research by looking at children's books.

He then advances to denser secondary sources about Richard, his family, and the Princes in the Tower, learning about the secret marriage agreement the princes’ father had made, which, when discovered after the father’s death, rendered the sons illegitimate. (Richard, next in line for the throne after the princes, became king by an act of Parliament.)

Grant and his research assistant eventually come to an unusual conclusion . . . or so they think. But history is long, ambiguous, and generally lacking in first-hand accounts-- so just about any point of view you can think of has probably been professed at some time or another.

The final irony is that Tey-- in her reversal of procedure and legend-- may have committed the same error in logic that many historians fall prey to. This has something to do with inductive and deductive logic, though I always screw it up. Detectives and historians should mainly use inductive logic-- look at the specific clues and data and draw the most logical conclusion. But they often use deductive logic-- they come up with a hypothesis and then find facts to fit the theory. This is what Detective Grant criticizes, but it may just be the way humans operate-- even when they are trying not to.

Literary critic Geraldine Barnes explains this better than I could:

In the end, Grant’s “solution” to the mystery has less to do with the probabilities of history than with the manipulation of evidence to produce a neat tying up of loose ends and the revelation that, in the best clue-puzzle tradition, the person least likely is the culprit. The novel “solves” the murder of the princes in terms of its own logic, but that logic is predicated upon the unswerving assumption that the prime suspect is innocent . . . the fatal flaw in her method is to stretch the boundaries of detective fiction beyond their naturalistic limits to the point where Richard III is, simply, too good to be true.

I still highly recommend this book-- it's nothing like any other crime novel I've ever read, and the case is compelling, convincing, and still being debated by historians today.