Mystery Book # 4- The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

While reading another 1000 page book from our main list I took a day out to read something much shorter from the mystery book list, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. This book is ranked pretty high on the list and on a similar list by the UK Crime Writers Association it is actually ranked as number one. So I had pretty high hopes for this one.

The story follows a detective that is stuck in a hospital bed while he is recuperating from an injury. While stuck there he becomes fascinated with Richard III and the crime that he allegedly committed hundreds of years ago - the murder of his two young nephews. He reads some books and gets someone to do some research for him and he ends up coming to his own conclusions on what really must have happened.

And that's about it. I must have missed something, because while I'd say it is a pretty good B+ type of book, I don't know  how anyone could say that it is the greatest mystery ever written. Maybe I'd need to be British and have lived in the 1950's to fully appreciate it. First off, I wasn't already familiar with the story of Richard the III. Pretty much everything I know about British kings I learned from watching The Tudors, so I never really knew this story (despite actually visiting the tower where the murder probably took place). So to call into question a major part of accepted history isn't a factor for me since I don't live in that country and it means nothing at all to me. Next, the book is clearly written as fiction so I don't actually know how much to believe of any of it. I feel like I would have enjoyed the unravelling of the real mystery and possible solutions if the book was presented as non-fiction complete with footnotes and references. The characters cite books and letters and such in dialogue but that isn't an actual cited reference. So how much of this book is actual research? I don't know and it sort of bugs me. Next, in the book everyone questioned about their knowledge of the story of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower have been taught that Richard had them murdered. Now maybe that was true sixty years ago when the book came out, but researching the true story on Wikipedia shows that no one now accepts that as an established fact and that really it is pretty much up in the air on what really happened. Maybe it was Richard III, maybe Henry VII, who knows? So maybe this has been a more recent development in the thinking of what happened (possibly caused by the publication of this book), or maybe the book just said that everyone thought history was wrong sixty years ago so that The Daughter of Time could exist. Again, I don't know.

Overall a B+. The mystery of who killed the princes is interesting, but I'd have preferred reading an actual non-fiction book that presents the evidence on what really happened.