Booklog 66/2024: Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time – Alan Grant #5 – Audiobook

[jacey]

Original review from 2012
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.

Audiobook 22/6/2024

This is brilliantly read by Derek Jacobi. He brings out the story beautifully. Of course, since |I read this in 2012, Dicky 3 turned up under a car park in Leicester, proving that he did, indeed, have scoliosis, so the 'hunch back' image is not wrong, but despite his spinal condition, Richard was a good soldier, sword-wielding and armour-wearing. I still find this book fascinating, though very historically biased.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Read it years ago and quite liked it.

[jacey]

It had me convinced but I don't know how much of this was fictionalised or, indeed, cherry-picked from the pages of history. I'd like to think Dicky 3 was innocent of the murders of the Princes in the Tower. I've always quite liked him as a character. Henry 7 seems a much more likely candidate if you follow the logic of the book. But I don't know enough of the detail to nod sagely or yell bunkum.

[cmcmck]

Henry VII is my however many times great grandfather so I tend to givd him the let off on this one.

[jacey]

Well, I guess you're allowed to give him a pass, but he had a lot more reason to get rid of the last few Plantagenets than Richard did.