Anne Kreamer recommends The Daughter of Time by Josephne Tey

If you enjoy mystery novels, author Anne Kreamer recommends The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey. It's one of a five book series featuring Tey's Inspector Alan Grant, Scotland Yard's top detective.

 

The Daughter of Time
By Josephine Tey
1951

I can trace my love of reading in a straight line back to the Stratemeyer Syndicate, starting with the maniacally cheerful antics of Bert, Nan, Freddie, and Flossie-The Bobbsey Twins. I was even more excited by Nancy Drew, fantasizing about a life of consequential intrigue with a bit of Ned Nickerson on the side. And after reading Harriet the Spy, I actually went so far as to buy a little journal and start furtively stalking my neighbors, hoping to ferret out some quirk in their habits that would point to a mysterious double life. This was the high Cold War era, and since there were nuclear missile silos in Kansas, why couldn't there be Soviet spies in my Kansas City suburb?

But it was a dozen years later, in 1978, that my future father-in-law introduced me to The Daughter of Time. Those kiddie mysteries that I'd devoured as a girl had, it turned out, whetted my appetite for the real thing, the graceful and lyrical Josephine Tey (a nom de plume of the Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh). The novel begins by introducing Tey's hero, Scotland Yard Superintendent Alan Grant, bored senseless and bed-bound in the hospital as he recovers from a leg broken in the line of duty. He asks his actress friend Marta to relieve his tedium. Believing that a policeman's stock-in-trade is assessing people's faces, Marta brings him photographs of portraits from the National Gallery. Grant becomes obsessed with one image, a picture, he guesses, of a judge. Told that the painting is of the infamous Richard III, he's troubled that his professional eye failed him-that he'd mistaken a beast for a good man.

Tey seamlessly weaves together fifteenth- and twentieth-century England, provocatively probes the nature of truth (the epigraph at the beginning of the book is "Truth is the daughter of time"), and posits a compelling argument vindicating Richard III, conventional history and Shakespeare notwithstanding.

Each book in Tey's entirely too small canon, just six novels in all, is as beautifully crafted as The Daughter of Time and deserves to be savored.

Anne Kreamer
Anne Kreamer, author of Going Gray, is a former executive vce president and worldwide creative director of Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, and was part of the founding team of Spy magazine.