A Combination of Mystery & History: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (1951)

The Daughter of Time is an unusual type of crime mystery in that a piece of English history is resurrected and brought into the 20th Century to be investigated. It concerns the reign of Richard III and the murder of the Princes in the Tower.
Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard conducts his own investigations into the four hundred year old mystery from a hospital bed where he is confined after an accident while on duty. Bored and despondent, nothing has much interest for him until one day a friend, endeavouring to cheer him up, brings him a collection of historical portraits of people who had some mystery attached to them.
Grant had always had a passion for faces, made a conscious study of them, and had an almost instinctive way of picking out a criminal on sight.
When he finds a portrait of a man in his mid-thirties, dressed in the fashion of the late fifteenth Century, he is arrested by the expression in the subject’s eyes:

Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details...

When Grant turns the portrait over and discovers the subject is Richard III, he is piqued that he mistook a notorious murderer for a judge. His first impression of the man in the portrait was certainly not that of a villain. This arouses his curiosity and so he begins his own investigation into the allegations against Richard.
Each of the four books I’ve read by Josephine Tey have been quite different from each other, although Inspector Alan Grant features in all of them. The Daughter of Time is different from any other mystery/crime novel I’ve ever read and I enjoyed its uniqueness and its mental challenge.
Tey unearths contemporary accounts, documents, and historical resources to present Richard Plantagenet from a different viewpoint. She reveals that Sir Thomas More, the author of More’s History of Richard III, had never known Richard at all and had, in fact, only been eight years old when Richard died at Bosworth. More obtained his account of Richard III from John Morton who was the Archbishop of Canterbury during Henry VII’s reign and a bitter enemy of Richard.
Tey not only turns the Princes in the Towers mystery on its head but also has a little swipe at Cromwell:

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...

And Mary Queen of Scots:

Her tragedy was that she was born a queen with the outlook of a suburban housewife...If you are willing to put a country of ten million people in pawn in order to score off a royal rival, then you end by being a friendless failure.

And she also has no time for the Scottish Covenanters:

The Covenanters were the exact equivalent of the I.R.A. in Ireland. A small irreconcilable minority, and as bloodthirsty a crowd as ever disgraced a Christian nation...A dragoon (read policeman) couldn’t arrest anyone without a warrant...but there was nothing to hinder a Covenanter lying snug in the heather and picking off dragoons at his leisure. Which they did, of course. And now there’s a whole literature about the poor ill-used saint in the heather with his pistol; the dragoon who died in the course of his duty is a Monster...Like Richard.

I read this book aloud to my thirteen year old daughter as it’s scheduled in Year 7 of the Ambleside Online curriculum and she really liked it, although it took a couple of chapters for her to get interested. As the AO website states, there are some sections that need editing for this age group, but they’re mostly in the first few chapters and they aren’t central to the story.

This book opened a wonderful door for the discussion of historical perspectives and bias and inspired Moozle to do a bit of reading on the Plantagenets and the Tudors. Then we started reading Shakespeare’s Richard III. Now, this was interesting after the perspective of The Daughter of Time! Shakespeare’s Richard III is a real creep. You only have to read the first two scenes of Act 1 before you believe Richard capable of every vile deed known to man.
Shakespeare’s Globe sheds some light on Shakespeare’s view of Richard. His portrait of Richard as a physical and moral monster is not accepted by modern historians.
The Daughter of Time is a splendid way to learn some history as well as being an enjoyable mystery.
Available free for Kindle

Updated to add this link: The Search for King Richard III (thanks to GretchenJoanna for passing this on!)


This is my choice for A Classic by a Woman Author in the 2018 Back to the Classics Challenge

Linked to Books You Loved.

11 Great Books for Dads to Read Aloud to all Ages

I'd Be Your Princess: A Royal Tale of Godly Character by Kathryn O'Brien, ill. by Michael Garland.

"If you were a king, I'd be your princess," said the little girl to her father.

This is a lovely book for a Dad to read to his little girl and it was one of Moozle's favourites for a long time. A little girl imagines being a princess and as she does, her Dad uses each situation to talk about the godly character he sees in his little girl. (For around ages 4 to 6)

"At night," said the girl, "we would look through our royal telescopes and you would teach me about all the stars and planets God made."

"You would listen carefully when I told you the name of each star," said her father, "because you love to learn."

Let us learn together what is good.

Job 34:4

Sarah Witcher's Story by Elizabeth Yates is based on a true incident and is the touching story of a little girl who wanders away from her home in the woods. After four days of searching she was still missing and only her father believed she was still alive. As the searching came to its close, a stranger arrived having travelled by foot from thirty miles away. He said he'd come to find the child.

Last night, when I walked into the inn at Plymouth, I heard talk of a lost child. I prayed that she would be found, and when I went to bed I dreamed of finding her.

A beautifully told, simple story of a father's unshakeable trust in the Lord. For around ages 6 to 10 years.

See inside the book here.

Little House in the Big Woods & Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder were two out of the series written by the author that Dad enjoyed reading aloud when our eldest two were about 4 and 6 years old. He brought back the boxed set from the USA when he was over there for work and the books are barely holding together after twenty years of use. Little House in the Big Woods was reminiscent of my husband's childhood growing up on a farm in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand...butchering time etc.

Farmer Boy with all its descriptions of food, farming life and deciding what direction to take in life  was another good Dad read aloud. Our children enjoyed these books as read alouds from the age of 4 years and then read them for themselves multiple times after that.

Jotham's Journey by Arnold Ytreeide is a tense, adventure filled book that Dads can read aloud with gusto and drama especially in the lead up to Christmas. It might scare some sensitive children but it didn't bother ours. After the success with this book I went ahead and bought another by the same author for my husband to read aloud but he hardly got through the first chapter before deciding it was no good. I can't remember which title it was but I didn't bother with any more after that.

In Freedom's Cause - Scotland, William Wallace, wars, adventure, historical accuracy...a great Dad hit. As was Under Drake's Flag. Henty wrote over a hundred historical fiction books for children and these are a couple that have been favourites - perhaps because Dad read them aloud.

We have a number of the Henty books in hardback but Dover has these paperback versions available  via Bookdepository.com.

Sun on the Stubble is voted the most memorable read aloud from Dad of all time - probably because he thought it was hilarious and kept reading ahead and then was unable to continue until he'd had a good laugh, but also because some of our children were in their teens and so remember it well. I wrote about it here.
 

I ended up reading the three books below to our children but I thought they'd be a good choice for Dads to read aloud to older children around the ages of 12 years and up. The author wrote of his family's missionary experiences and his boyhood among the Machiguenga Indians in South America and although quite raw in places (the superstitious practices of the Machiguenga, their beliefs and behaviour are intertwined in the books), they are also light-hearted and very funny. My kids loved them, probably because the stories are about a very ordinary family and their very ordinary and imperfect children and have a different slant to many other missionary stories.
Wycliffe has some previews of the books here.