The Daughter of Time: Unraveling Historical Mysteries

1. Week 9: Historical MysteryJosephine TeyThe Daughter of Time (1951)

2. Josephine Tey (1896-1952) • Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh. Born in 1896 in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. • She was educated at Inverness Royal Academy, a grammar school, and then the Antsey School of Physical Training in Birmingham. • She taught physical instruction in England and Scotland before returning home to look after her father. • Her first literary pseudonym was Gordon Daviot, which she used with her first novel and historical plays. Particularly successful was Richard of Bordeaux (1932), a play about Richard II, which helped launch the career of John Gielgud. • Her first novel was The Man in the Queue (1929), which introduced her detective character Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard. He featured in six of her novels. Grant as the diligent (rather than genius) detective: ‘He wished he was one of these marvellous creatures of super-instinct and infallible judgment who adorned the pages of detective stories, and not just a hard-working, well-meaning, ordinarily intelligent Detective Inspector.’ – A Shilling for Candles(1936). • She used the pen name Josephine Tey for all except the first of her mystery novels. • The majority of her crime novels were published after WWII. The Daughter of Time was her last book, published shortly before her death. She died of cancer in 1952. • Has been seen as a very private or elusive person.

3. The Daughter of Time • Inspector Grant, confined to a hospital bed, investigates the alleged murders committed by Richard III. Fascinated by a portrait of the king. • Challenges the idea that Richard III was responsible, and puts forward Henry VII as the guilty party. • Explores how history is constructed (typically by the victors). How myths come to be accepted as fact (despite lack of evidence or plausibility). • Disdain for false or misleading narratives that form in the popular imagination – Tonypandy Riots (1910) – the idea that troops shot at the public. • Pastiches different types of historical writing – school textbooks, popular history, historical fiction, weighty constitutional histories. • Grant works with a young historical researcher, Brent Carradine. He also applies police methods in building the evidence and establishing his case. • The novel’s popularity – paperback edition reprinted 20 times between 1956-80. Made history accessible and even romantic. • Followed by other novels, plays, and biographies sympathetic to Richard III. Though Winston Churchill affirmed his conviction of Richard III’s guilt in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. • In 1990, it was ranked 1stin the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time. In 1995 it came 4th in a similar list of Mystery Novels compiled by the Mystery Writers of America.

4. Richard III • When Edward IV died in 1483, his son and heir was only a child, so Richard was declared Lord Protector of the Realm. • Proclaimed King by Act of Parliament due to the alleged illegitimacy of his nephews. • Central mystery: whether he murdered his nephews to strengthen his claim to the throne. Villain or unfairly maligned? • Tudor-era historians and writers proclaimed his guilt. Shakespeare cemented this image. Since then, efforts to redeem his reputation. Tey inspired by Clements Markham’s 1906 defence. • The novel propounds the idea it was Henry VII, Richard’s successor, who was responsible for the boys’ deaths. • Tey’s first foray into the debate was her play Dickon written in the 1940s. But it wasn’t produced or performed in Tey’s lifetime. Critics have seen it as too convoluted to have popular appeal. • New Yorker: ‘it was a 1951 mystery novel that sparked mass interest in Richard’s redemption’. • 2012: remains of Richard III found in car park in Leicester. King Richard III. Unknown Artist. 16th century. National Portrait Gallery (Creative Commons).

5. Historical Crime Fiction ‘There are three ways to appropriate the past in historical crime fiction, all of which involve the interpreting of the past in narrative terms. One way is to relocate historical cases in the present by updating and fictionalising them […] The second way to appropriate historical cases employs a trans-historical framework, in which actual cases from the past are “re-opened”by detectives in the present. […] The third method […] is the use of “straight” historical fiction […]’ - John Scraggs, Crime Fiction (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005), p. 129.

6. Historical Crime Fiction ‘Against the failings of historians, she makes large claims for the ability of novelists and painters to uncover and represent the truth about persons and events. Tey’s“arm-chair”investigator […] is no sort of historian, amateur or professional. Rather, as a career police officer, he possesses analogous investigative skills and a deep understanding of human motivation honed by years of experience, observation, and reflection. TheDaughter of Time exemplifies the pro-Ricardian tendencies in popular culture and is arguably the most widely circulated positive image of Richard III in the twentieth century.’ - R. Gordon Kelly, ‘Josephine Tey and Others: The Case of Richard III’, in The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, ed. by Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jnr(Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. 133-46 (p. 134).