Review: The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Definitely unusual. Tey's detective, laid up in hospital after being injured in pursuit of a suspect, gets interested in history, and applies his police methods to the (then) 400-year-old mystery of what happened to the Princes in the Tower, the two young sons of Edward IV. Did their uncle Richard III have them murdered, as the Tudors and their sponsored authors claimed and as history books have taught ever since, or was that a complete frame-up?

The case comes across as compelling, though apparently Tey left a few things out, and it's not as cut-and-dried as she paints it. Historians certainly object to her approach, perhaps partly because she has some harsh words for historians who draw conclusions completely at odds with the facts they present. She touches on other historical rewrites along the way, again not always completely accurately. For example, she mentions the riots at Tonypandy in Wales in 1910, and the detective and his historical researcher adopt "Tonypandy" as a shorthand for an exaggerated story that's widely believed - in this case, that troops fired on the rioters; but she elides a few of the details, including the fact that one person did die in the riots (though whether as a result of police action or not has never been definitively settled).

Still, while it's possible to quibble over details, this book takes the detective story to a new and unusual place, and manages to make an interesting novel out of a man in a hospital bed reading books and talking to a young researcher about events of four centuries previously, which itself is no mean feat. I found it very educational about a time in English history I was only passingly familiar with, the end and aftermath of the Wars of the Roses, and it also has some things to say about how history is written by the victors and/or the popular imagination, and the difference between what people say happened and what the day-to-day records of ordinary actions show.

Setting aside whether or not its conclusions are as justified as they're made to seem, or whether Tey herself is committing Tonypandy, it's a masterful piece of writing that deserves five stars just for the degree of difficulty, and I also found it entertaining.

Sadly, the HarperCollins ebook edition belies its own claim that they "uphold the highest standards of ebook production" with numerous missing punctuation marks, the obvious result of their usual lack of attention to detail and lack of editorial effort. This book deserves better.

View all my reviews