Josephine Tey, Sleuthing Into The Mystery of History

Terence Rigby and Ian McKellen in a 1992 production of Shakespeare's "Richard III," which paints a picture of a king surpassingly evil. (John Haynes)

Henry is of the house of Lancaster, Richard the house of York. The former's ascent to the throne as Henry VII ushers in the Tudor dynasty and marks the beginning of the end of the three decades of battle between the two houses, known as the Wars of the Roses -- a conflict acerbically described by Inspector Alan Grant as "meaningless as watching a crowd of dodgem cars bumping and whirling at a fair." By way of a fine example of Tey's prose, consider Grant's brisk summary:

"For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman. No one pushed in at your door to demand whether you were York or Lancaster and to hale you off to a concentration camp if your answer proved to be the wrong one for the occasion. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party. They fought in your lower meadow, and turned your kitchen into a dressing-station, and then moved off somewhere or other to fight a battle somewhere else, and a few weeks later you would hear what had happened at that battle, and you would have a family row about the result because your wife was probably Lancaster and you were perhaps York, and it was all rather like following rival football teams."

These musings come to Grant as he lies in his hospital bed, his leg broken in the line of duty. Various novels lie by his bedside, evanescent things he has no interest in reading, the flimsiness of which he dispatches in a few wicked paragraphs. He wonders: "Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays [enslaved] to a formula?" -- which is, of course, Tey's declaration that no formulas are to be used in the pages that follow.

Grant's reveries are interrupted by the arrival of his friend Marta Hallard, a hugely successful and entirely lovely actress; in book after book their relationship remains (so far as the reader can discern) maddeningly platonic, but that is just another of Tey's jokes. When Grant confesses that, immobilized as he is, he has fallen under "the prickles of boredom," Marta suggests he do some "academic investigating. . . . Finding a solution to an unsolved problem." She brings him a gallery of faces -- Grant is a great one for the study of faces -- from the print shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum. One, the "portrait of a man . . . dressed in the velvet cap and slashed doublet of the late fifteenth century," especially interests him:

"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. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it, less positive than the look on a cripple's face, but as inescapable."

He turns the likeness over and learns that it is Richard the Third: "Crouchback. The monster of nursery stories. The destroyer of innocence. A synonym for villainy." His curiosity is piqued. He does not believe that a man with that face could have committed those murders: "Nothing in that face fits the facts of history." Nurses and friends bring him books, and Marta persuades a young American who is doing research at the British Museum to help his inquiry. Grant becomes a bedridden cop on the beat: "I'm asking myself the question that every policeman asks in every case of murder: Who benefits? And for the first time it occurs to me that the glib theory that Richard got rid of the boys to make himself safer on the throne is so much nonsense."

If nonsense it is, then it is nonsense widely accepted. Honigmann writes: "Some have . . . tried to prove Richard not guilty of the death of the two princes in the Tower; but the majority still holds with the common opinion of the time that the chief beneficiary had the greatest motive." Tell that to Alan Grant. He believes that another player in this cast of characters -- a man described as "a crab; he never went straight at anything" -- had far more to gain from the death of the princes than did Richard.

The case made by Grant and Tey seems to me persuasive, if far from ironclad. Winston Churchill, who knew rather more about such matters than I, read the novel and, in "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples," disagreed: "It will take many ingenious books to raise the issue to the dignity of a historical controversy." On and on the argument will go, as it had for centuries before this novel appeared, but when considering "The Daughter of Time" one does best to relegate historical nitpicking and even amateur sleuthing to the background. Concentrate on the book's virtues as fiction and its exploration of the mystery and uncertainty and downright falsehood that too often are at the heart of our inquiries into the past. Alan Grant has a word for that: "Tonypandy." To find out what it means, read "The Daughter of Time," which repays the reading many times over.

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey, Scribner Paperback Fiction, $12. Eight of Tey's novels are reprinted in this series, and all are also easily found in used-book stores, on the Internet and in libraries.