Josephine Tey, “The Daughter of Time”

A detective flat on his back. A five-hundred-year-old murder. And a face that doesn’t look like a killer’s.

Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard has fallen through a trap-door while chasing a criminal, and now he lies in a hospital bed, staring at the ceiling and slowly going mad with boredom. Then a friend brings him a pile of portraits to study, because Grant prides himself on reading faces. One of them stops him. It is the face of a man of great conscience, a judge perhaps, a man who has suffered. It belongs to Richard III, the king who, as every schoolchild knows, murdered his two young nephews in the Tower of London.

Grant does not believe it. With the help of an eager young American researcher at the British Museum, and without ever leaving his bed, he reopens the most famous cold case in English history. He reads the chronicles, checks the dates, questions the sources and, like any good detective, asks the simplest question of all: who actually benefited?

Voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the British Crime Writers’ Association, Josephine Tey’s masterpiece is a mystery without a corpse, a chase or a single step outside a hospital room, and it is utterly gripping. It will change the way you think about history, about evidence, and about the stories everybody believes.

Josephine Tey (1896-1952), the pen name of Scottish writer Elizabeth MacKintosh, is one of the most celebrated authors of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Renowned for works such as The Franchise Affair and The Daughter of Time, she was praised for her originality, psychological depth, and her ability to reshape the conventions of the genre.

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