The Daughter Of Time

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, 1951

Would you call Truth, Dear Reader, a trickster or a friend? 

"Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority", so sayeth Francis Bacon in 1620. Or more, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it", as pronounced by Winston Churchill in 1948?

It would appear that it is as slippery as an eel, indeed, when a little bit of amateur sleuthing reveals that both these well-known quotations might, after all, be misattributed and misquoted, respectively. History as laid out by Historians, for consumption by minds young & pliable or seasoned & cynical, must surely be littered with both facts and fancies, despite the best intentions (or worst). And the Truth, well, objective Truth, about History as it is made can be very subjective, even slipping into Legend or Propaganda, depending on who gets to write it. 

Anyways, it's not all po-faced seriousness around here, it's just Your Correspondent's introduction to a long-overdue book spoiler. From the Golden Age of Crime Writing, no less. Ah, who doesn't love them? So breezy, such scintillating dialogue, a little hint of glamour, nearly always a brace of young lovers and a (usually) well-deserved victim whom everyone has motive to bump off, red herrings galore and a tidy & happy ending. So many of my favourite things. 

And wherein you might find exchanges about royalty, vintage fashion and brazen opinion all elbowing for space on the one page: 

    'Oh, not Mary Queen of Scots!'

    'Why not?' asked Marta, who like all actresses saw Mary Stuart through a haze of white veils.

    'I could be interested in a bad woman but never in a silly one.'

    'Silly?' said Marta in her best lower-register Electra voice.

    'Very silly.'

    'Oh, Alan, how can you!'

    'If she had worn another kind of headdress no one would ever have bothered about her. It's that cap that seduces people.'

    'You think she would have loved less greatly in a sun-bonnet?'

    'She never loved greatly at all, in any kind of bonnet.'

    Marta looked as scandalised as a lifetime in the theatre and an hour of careful make-up allowed her to.

    'Why do you think that?'

    'Mary Stuart was six feet tall. Nearly all out-sized women are cold. Ask any doctor.'

Bliss.

Is this Mary's seductive cap, so quoth?

Or is it this velvet bonnet?

This book, though, is slightly different from the, oh, couple of dozen I've knocked off in the past while. No locked room in a country manor, or quaint village with the attendant eccentrics, or even Mayfair ballroom in interwar London here. No cyanide, sparkling or otherwise, or Morris Dancer's decapitation, or shooting stick as grisly murder weapon. Rather, our dapper and charismatic detective, Inspector Alan Grant, is laid up in hospital, bored and recovering from a Workplace Incident and whiles the time casting a fresh policeman's eye over a four hundred-year old whodunit, wherein the victims are not even sure to have been dispatched, let alone how.

Using only his Little Grey Cells, to borrow from another favourite meticulous detective, and the legwork of a keen young researcher to ferret out the necessary facts for him from real and invented sources, "Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time", he investigates not the plight of the imprisoned Mary Stuart, as she's plain silly, but the mystery of the fabled missing Princes in the Tower*, alleged to have been murdered by, or for, the wicked King Richard III. The challenge to Historians is on!

The Princes in the Tower, 1878
John Everett Millais

I was very moved as a child by John Everett Millais' sepia reproduction of the tragic princes and its accompanying lurid description, an essay by one Ehrma G. Filer in the vintage University Society's encyclodædic children's series on our shelves. She told the tragic tale of their lives and their wicked uncle, and finished with the flourish, "These unfortunate little Princes stand there proudly, though their hearts are beating fast. They remind us far too well of the old unhappy days of long ago, before the spirit of democracy ruled the world." Sob!

The villain of the piece?
The seductive velvet cap suggests not!

History, as taught in the sad and scratchy curriculum of the 1970's in Australia, no longer plumped out the tales of the Kings & Queens of Britain, so what I knew of Richard III was from the said Bookshelf for Boys & Girls, Shakespeare and general knowledge. Of course, the 2012 discovery of his skeleton under a carpark in Leicester brought me somewhat up-to-date and illuminated the scale of the rehabilitation of his reputation by some. And it turns out that Ms. Tey's popular 1951 book was one where many of the arguments of his innocence in the murders were laid out. 

In no time all, for I swing like the wind, I do, the Ricardian side won me over completely upon the discovery that the "contemporary" account of the whole matter, the oft-referenced one by the celebrated Sir Thomas More who was a mere child during Richard's reign, was likely written by one Cardinal John Morton, who was an actual enemy of the king. Morton and More were likely propogandists for the Tudors, and before dear Richard, the last of the Plantagenets, was even cold in his shallow and hasty grave, their lurid tale had become the Truth, and was dished up to children centuries later as History. Lo! we have a textbook example of the fallibility of Great Minds and the undeserved influence they wield. 

Inspector Grant swiftly tosses out the Morton/More evidence and sets to his Case as a detective–looking for motive, means & opportunity among the other players of the time. Looking, in other words, for Facts.

The fact that Sir Thomas was a martyr and a Great Mind did not cut any ice at all with him, Alan Grant. He, Alan Grant, had known Great Minds so uncritical that they would believe a story that would make a con. man blush for shame. He had known a great scientist who was convinced that a piece of butter muslin was his great-aunt Sophia because an illiterate medium from the back streets of Plymouth had told him so ... As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned there was nothing so uncritical or so damn-silly as your Great Mind. As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned Thomas More was washed out, cancelled, deleted ...

And is this the first use of the word cancelled to apply to a public persona? In 1951? How modish!

Not to mention the long term consquence of Cromwell's insistence on a warts & all portrait:

    'If you ask me,' the surgeon said, absent-mindedly considering the splint on Grant's leg, 'Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. "I'm a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me." And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.' He pinched Grant's toe with detached interest. 'It's a raging disease. A horrible perversion. In some parts of the States, I understand, it's as much as a man's political life is worth to go to some constituencies with his tie tied and his coat on. That's being stuffed-shirt. The beau ideal is to be one of the boys...'

I'm with you Ms. Tey. Whatever happened to one's Sunday Best for being seen out and about town? How times haven't changed.

If you have not met Inspector Grant before, do not think he is just a cynical curmudgeon, intent on taking a wrecking ball to tradition and scholarship. He is a charming and insightful man. Viz. his contemplated Christmas surprise for his frugal and modest housekeeper Mrs Tinker, whose care he will submit to after leaving his hospital bed. He had been lavishing elegant handbags upon her each year, which never again see the light of day, suspected to be squirrelled away in a drawer as treasures:

Next Christmas he was going to open this shabby sack of hers, this perennial satchel à tout faire, and put something in the money compartment. She would fritter it away, of course, in small unimportances; so that in the end she would not know what she had done with it; but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.

Was it Colonel Mustard
with the candlestick in the library?

No, The Daughter of Time, is not your typical Cluedo trope. There is no tidy ending to the mystery, save ol' Pipistrello being pretty darned convinced that Richard III has come off badly in the court of public opinion. And while Ms. Tey has quite possibly massaged and stretched what is really known about Richard and his nephews, it is a witty and pleasurable read, even if you are not drawn to the escapist pleasures of the Golden Age of Crime fiction.

* ERII had allegedly been approached three times for permission to have DNA testing done on the two skeletons found interred in 1674 under stairs in the Tower of London but refused. Or maybe it was the Church of England, the custodians of the remains, that refused. Either way, the mystery continues!

Image credits: 1,6: via Google; 2,3,5: Wikimedia Commons; 4: Flying With Hands