The Daughter of Time

Preface to This Edition

Josephine Tey was one of two pseudonyms used by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) a Scottish author best known for her mystery novels and her play Richard of Bordeaux.

She was born in Inverness, and attended a physical training college in Birmingham before becoming a teacher. Her literary career began when she was forced to give up regular work in order to care for her invalid father.

Ms Tey began to write full-time after the successful publication of her first novel, The Man in the Queue (1929), which introduced Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard. In 1937 she returned to crime writing with A Shilling for Candles, but it wasn’t until after the Second World War that the majority of her crime novels were published. She died in 1952, leaving her entire estate to the National Trust.

Josephine Tey appears as a main character in An Expert in Murder (Faber 2008) by Nicola Upson, a detective story woven around the original production of Richard of Bordeaux.

Alan Grant, Scotland Yard Inspector (who appears in five other novels by the same author) is confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. Bored and restless, he becomes intrigued by a portrait of King Richard III brought to him by a friend. He prides himself on being able to read a person’s character from his face, and King Richard seems to him a gentle and kind and wise man. Why is everyone so sure that he was a cruel murderer?

With the help of friends and acquaintances he investigates the case of the Princes in the Tower. Grant checks historical information and documents with the help of an American researcher. Using his detective’s logic, he comes to the conclusion that the claim of Richard being a murderer is a fabrication of Tudor propaganda, as is the popular image of the King as a monstrous hunchback.

Further, the author explores how history is constructed, and how certain versions of events come to be widely accepted as the truth, despite a lack of evidence. “The Daughter of Time” of the title is from a quote by Sir Francis Bacon: “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.” Grant comes to understand the ways that great myths are constructed, and how in this case, the victorious Tudors saw to it that their version of history prevailed. Several other such myths are explored by the author, such as the commonly believed (but false) story that troops fired on the public at the 1910 Tonypandy Riot.