Book Log 49/2012 - Josephine Tey: Daughter of Time

[jacey]

I should have read this years ago, but I've finally made it.

A policeman lies in a hospital bed nursing a broken leg and a king-sized beef about the fairness of life. A friend gets him interested in the mystery of Richard III and who really killed the princes in the tower. With the aid of a researcher to do the leg-work and unearth original sources he gradually solves the mystery and we learn as he learns. It's all pieced together as a police procedural and it makes fascinating reading. I'm convinced. It's a great example of how the winners write the history. Poor old Dicky 3, who by all accounts was an excellent if short-lived monarch, was very probably the victim of a fit-up by Henry 7 and his cronies. How it all happened and the conclusions drawn from original sources is really the heart of this book. It's not about the result, it's about the process.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Please, don't treat this book as history, because it treats its sources in a cavalier fashion. In fact, one historian was so incensed that he wrote a detective story of his own analysing where Tey took her theories from, what she missed out and why the dating does not work. (I don't recommend To Prove a Villain because, to be frank, it is a pretty awful detective story, but the history is much more accurate.)

Most importantly, Tey misses out Mancini's contemporary reports from London and that the people there were convinced of the Princes' murder by Richard. These were already available.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

What _lil_shepherd_ said.

Tay was an avid Ricardian- which is to say somewhat eccentric in her view of historical reality. Her history was way out of date even when the book was written and there's ample evidence that Richard was guilty as charged- realpolitik was the order of the day and Richard was a past master.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit of a Ricardian myself, so without taking this as anything other than fiction, I'd like to like it.