The Daughter Of Time: A gripping historical mystery

Product Information

I really enjoyed the character of Alan Grant and have marked this series as one I want to read starting back at book one, The Man in the Queue which was written in 1929! Colin Dexter uses the same plot device of the incapacitated Chief Inspector Morse solving an old mystery in The Wench Is Dead. Using his detective skills Inspector Grant sifts the evidence and the collaborators find Richard resoundingly not guilty of the crimes levelled against him by history – ie of murdering, or causing to be murdered, his 2 young nephews, the Princes in the Tower. One of Tey’s finest novels, this suspenseful story centres on the mysterious death of a young man on a train, and the cryptic poem that gradually reveals the greed and envy behind his demise.

The Rear Window inspiration is quite clear - Inspector Grant is laid up with a broken leg, and is tired of looking at the ceiling. Other alleged historical myths touched upon by the author are the commonly believed (but false) story that troops fired on the public at the 1910 Tonypandy Riot, the traditional depiction of the Boston Massacre, the martyrdom of Margaret Wilson and the life and death of Mary, Queen of Scots.Even the novels piled at his bedside, the latest works of the fictional best-selling authors Silas Weekley and Lavinia Fitch, don’t interest him. Assisted and hindered in turns by his tyrannical nurses, a glamorous actress and an American student, Grant unearths a surprising quantity of evidence. citation needed] Grant's case for the innocence of Richard III [ edit ] Late 16C portrait of Richard III (National Portrait Gallery, London), copied from an early 16C one in the Royal Collections.

Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world's most heinous villains - a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother's children to make his crown secure? It’s an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, bluff King Hall, wife murderer, son of Henry VIIth, first Tudor, the one who had killed the vile Richard in 1485 ‘ ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse……. A Scotland Yard police inspector, bedridden by a fall, after seeing a portrait of Richard III, decides to investigate why he is considered a despotic king when his face does not denote such tendencies. Her first published work was Britain’s Royal Families (1989), and subsequently she has written a number of biographies including The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1991); The Princes in the Tower (1992; The Folio Society, 1999; republished as Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, 2014); Elizabeth the Queen (1998); Isabella: She-Wolf of France, Queen of England (2005); and Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen (2013).Rarely does a procedural, after so clearly identifying the perpetrator, go on to thoroughly exonerate him. One of the portraits is of Richard III, the despised hunchback we read about in history, who supposedly killed his two nephews in the tower. 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. Another Folio edition from the mistress of crime best known for her unusual and surprise-filled mysteries.

I imagine he and Carradine doing the same with the 3-D reconstruction we have now, marvelling at the latest Great Discovery.

Grant studies the painting and thinks a guy with such a lovable face just couldn’t have done those terrible things (and given his background as a detective, Grant knows faces). This book remains an all time favourite, although I would now consider Brat Farrar as the best Tey I have read. In the book, Tey successfully argues that history is written by the victors, and that Richard the Third was maligned by bad propaganda by the Tudors. Cualquiera diría que fue Ricardo III, que para eso es el protagonista de la mayor obra de propaganda jamás creada por Shakespeare, ¿pero es eso cierto?

An eye opener for how history is written to the benefit of those in power while revealing how other past events actually happened, not how they have been portrayed. What’s most fascinating about Tey’s literate book is the investigation itself and what unfolds, in real time, for the reader to ponder. I hadn't ever totally believed the story about Richard getting his nephews killed ( I think I must be one of the few people who has never seen Shakespeare's malign play about him, either). The story that More and Shakespeare and the history books tell doesn’t hold up under interrogation, and Grant can’t hide his frustration with the supposedly learned historians who repeat it.The binding depicts the detective chasing after the ever-elusive princes and the endpapers are printed with the family trees of Edward III and Ralph Nevill, the 1st Earl of Westmorland. She was born in Inverness in 1896, and taught physical education for a number of years before the success of her first book, The Man in the Queue, in 1929. The book explores how history is constructed, and how certain versions of events come to be widely accepted as the truth, despite a lack of evidence and/or any logical plausibility. Folio commissioned Hokyoung Kim for the artwork, while the late author’s wife, Wendy Benchley, provides a fascinating new introduction. Tey lays out such a convincing case that that the last Plantagenet’s infamy was simply the results of a successful propaganda effort by the first Tudor, the future Henry VII that I have absolutely no doubt at all that all of the crimes laid to Richard, Duke of York, the future Richard III — including the deaths of the two princeling sons of Richard’s beloved older brother, Edward IV — really belong on Henry VII.