The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
In September 2012, archaeologists started digging in a parking lot in Leicester, England. On their first day of work, they found a skeleton. The bones belonged to a man in his thirties who had died violently — a large bladed weapon had struck the back of his skull. He had been buried in a simple grave and then forgotten for five centuries, his tomb lost when the friary church above it was dissolved and demolished.
The skeleton was Richard III — the last Plantagenet king, the last English monarch killed in battle, and for five hundred years one of the most despised figures in English history.
He had been beneath a parking lot for a long time, lost to history.
I thought about that parking lot constantly while reading Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time — a novel published in 1951, more than sixty years before the bones were found, which argued Richard III had been framed.
The Book: The Daughter of Time
I picked up The Daughter of Time because of a post on X that described it as fiction applied to real history — not historical fiction, where invented characters inhabit real events, but a fictional method applied to an actual historical mystery. That description turned out to be exactly right.
The novel begins slowly — intentionally so. A detective named Inspector Grant, confined in a hospital with a back injury and feeling restless, is given a stack of photographs to pass the time. One of them is a portrait of Richard III. Grant becomes fascinated with the face, not as a villain’s face, he thinks, but as the face of a judge or someone burdened. He decides to investigate. The cold case he chooses is five hundred years old.
I have to admit, I lost the book on a plane—yes, really. I dozed off between paragraphs, and when I finally woke up, the book was just gone. I waited until everyone deboarded, chatted with the flight attendants, and even searched between all the seats—still no book. That mystery remains unsolved. In the end, I had to order another copy from Amazon.
Anyway, back to the story. This is my first time meeting Grant — he appears in other Tey novels, though this one stands alone perfectly well. What makes him an effective detective for this particular case is that he approaches it with no investment in the conclusion. He’s not a historian with a thesis to defend. He’s a detective with a method: follow the evidence, question the sources, don’t assume the account you received is true just because it’s received.
What he finds is damning — not of Richard, but of the sources that convicted him.
The Case Against Richard III — and Who Made It
The prevailing image of Richard III, cherished by those years or decades later, depicts him as a cunning, physically deformed villain who ruthlessly murdered his young nephews in the Tower of London to claim the throne. His brief and brutal reign was marked by tyranny, culminating in his defeat and death at Bosworth Field in 1485, where the righteous Henry Tudor emerged victorious.
This account has a remarkable cultural staying power. It lives most vividly in Shakespeare’s Richard III — one of the most memorable portraits of villainy in the English language. The opening monologue alone has shaped how English-speaking civilization imagines this king for four hundred years. And the line “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” — shouted by Richard on the battlefield as his forces collapsed around him — is among the most quoted lines Shakespeare ever wrote.
The play is also almost certainly propaganda.
Shakespeare was writing under Elizabeth I, the granddaughter of Henry VII, the man who defeated and killed Richard at Bosworth. The Tudor dynasty needed Richard to be a monster. A legitimate king, murdered by an usurper, is a problem. A monstrous tyrant, overthrown by a heroic reformer, becomes a founding myth. Shakespeare, regardless of his private views, was working within a court culture that had strong reasons to preserve that myth.
What Grant observes — and what Tey builds her case around — is that the main sources against Richard III are almost all Tudor. The most detailed account of the murders, which forms the backbone of the case, was written by Thomas More — a man born two years before Bosworth, writing decades after the events he described, under the patronage of the very family that overthrew Richard. More’s account was then absorbed by chroniclers, and from them it passed to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to us.
That isn’t history. It’s the passing down of a political verdict through generations until it becomes accepted as fact.
The skeleton found in 2012 confirmed one piece of this: Richard III was not a hunchback. He had scoliosis — a curvature of the spine that would have been noticeable but almost certainly not the grotesque deformity that Shakespeare and the Tudor chroniclers described. Even his body was exaggerated to serve the narrative.
This was actually the reason I initially picked up the novel. I recall reading the news about how they found him and realizing he was not the creature from Shakespeare’s legend. I wanted to, as Paul Harvey says, know the rest of the story.
Richard as a Person
One thing I did not expect from this novel: Richard III becomes sympathetic.
Not just exonerated — sympathetic. Almost likable. Through Grant’s investigation, Tey builds a picture of a man who was, by the standards of his age, a reasonably competent and loyal administrator, a capable military commander, and someone who seems to have had genuine support in northern England. The charges against him dissolve one by one under scrutiny.
Because the entire novel takes place in Grant’s room, with the help of a research assistant who happens to be American and somewhat new to English history, Grant is stuck on his back and can do nothing but read, think, and talk—there’s no internet, no Google, just research through primary sources and records. We experience the discovery line-up gradually, as he uncovers it himself. In the process, we also come to know Richard and understand his personality, which contrasts significantly with the one presented by Shakespeare.
You finish the book wondering what would have happened if Henry Tudor’s forces hadn’t won at Bosworth. It’s a rare thing — a detective novel that makes you mourn its subject, or maybe even reconsider your view of history.
What “The Daughter of Time” Actually Means
The title comes from a Latin proverb — Veritas filia temporis, “truth is the daughter of time” — sometimes attributed to Francis Bacon, sometimes to the Roman writer Aulus Gellius. It is the novel’s central argument: that given enough distance, the truth eventually surfaces. That lies, however well constructed, become harder to sustain over centuries. That time is, ultimately, on the side of accuracy.
Tey believed this. Whether she was entirely right about Richard III is, genuinely, a matter of scholarly debate. Historians have pushed back on parts of her argument. The question of who killed the princes in the Tower — if they were killed at all — remains open.
But that almost isn’t the point. The novel’s deeper argument isn’t about Richard specifically. It’s about how we know what we know. It’s about the difference between a primary source and received wisdom. It’s about the fact that most of what we “know” about historical figures came to us filtered through people who had reasons — political, personal, financial — to shape the story.
This is a lesson I thought I already knew. I’ve spent enough time reading history and occasionally looking at primary sources to understand that history is interpretive — that what gets written down is shaped by who holds the pen. But The Daughter of Time made that lesson concrete in a way that years of reading about historiography had not. Tey put a specific man in the dock, walked through the evidence against him, and showed how the verdict was assembled. It is one thing to know in the abstract that winners write history. It is another to watch it happen in slow motion.
Tey Herself
Josephine Tey was born Elizabeth Mackintosh in Inverness, Scotland in 1896. She wrote under two pen names — Josephine Tey for her detective fiction and Gordon Daviot for her plays and other work. She was by most accounts a private and somewhat reclusive figure, and she died in 1952, just a year after The Daughter of Time was published — before she could see the lasting impact the novel would have.
She left a small but remarkable body of work. Grant appears in several novels, all of which I have heard are worth reading. But The Daughter of Time is the one that endures. It was voted the #1 crime novel of all time by the British Crime Writers’ Association in 1990, and ranked #4 by the Mystery Writers of America in 1995. It was published 75 years ago. Some books earn their reputation.
The Ricardians
One of the more fascinating footnotes to the novel is what it helped create. In the decades since publication, Tey’s book has turned many of the idly curious into what are now called Ricardians — people committed to rehabilitating Richard III’s historical reputation. The Richard III Society, founded in 1924, has grown substantially since the novel appeared. They were instrumental in organizing the 2012 excavation that found his bones.
Is The Daughter of Time historically accurate? Scholars debate it. Some of Tey’s conclusions are contested. Some of Grant’s dismissals are too quick. But the book’s accuracy is almost secondary to its effect: it taught a generation of readers to ask who wrote this, and why, before accepting a historical verdict.
That is not a bad lesson to take from a detective novel.
Why I Recommend It
I picked The Daughter of Time up not knowing exactly what to expect, but genuinely curious. I finished it and was moved — not by the plot, which is deliberately unhurried, but by the argument. It is a cerebral book, not an exciting one. Nothing much happens in the physical sense. A man lies in a bed and thinks very hard. Sometimes he has visitors.
And yet it is one of the more engaging books I’ve read in some time, because the thinking is genuinely interesting, Tey is a careful writer, and the stakes — how we understand the past, how reputations are built and destroyed, who gets to write history — turn out to matter. Tey promises to answer a mystery, and the answer is satisfying.
The detective’s question is: who did it? The novel’s question is: how do we know? Those turn out to be the same question. The answer, in both cases, is to follow the evidence, question your sources, and not mistake received wisdom for truth.
Published in 1951. Hasn’t aged a day.
(Except it would have been a lot shorter if the internet had existed.)
The Daughter of Time
Mystery
Peter Davies
1951
206 pages
Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history. 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? Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the usurpers of England’s throne? Grant determines to find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar, what kind of man Richard Plantagenet really was and who killed the Little Princes in the Tower.
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