Book review: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey opens the fifth book in her Inspector Alan Grant series with a swipe at series of novels: "Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.  ...  Their interest was not in the book but in its newness.  They knew quite well what the book would be like."  With such a knowing remark as that one, it should come as no surprise that Tey consciously breaks the expected pattern in The Daughter of Time, the sixty-first book I read in 2015.

Alan is laid up in hospital for the entirety of the novel, recovering from a broken leg suffered while chasing down a suspect.  Bored beyond words by the books sent to him by friends to pass the time (hence the remarks about formulas), he is encouraged by Marta Hallard to explore the coldest of cold cases: historic unsolved mysteries.  Inspired by this contemporary portrait by an unknown artist and aided by a young American scholar, he takes up the rehabilitation of Richard III, whom Shakespeare indelibly marked as a villain.

Richard III is clearly a hobbyhorse of Tey's, and while her arguments that he wasn't the murderer the history written by his enemies portrayed him to be are persuasive, I find Alan's reasoning specious. Tey once again relies on the proposal that a person can be reliably judged by his demeanor, and since Inspector Grant, with his canny sense of people, thinks Richard looks honest, he can't possibly be a devious plotter and premeditated murderer.  Add to this that Alan is basing his judgment on a portrait, rather than a photograph or first-hand sight of the man in question, and that, moreover, he questions the talent and ability of the unknown painter competently to portray the king, and his basis for taking up the investigation in the first place is unsound, no matter how logical the rest of his deductions may be.