The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time

First edition cover
Author	Josephine Tey
Language	English
Genre	Mystery novel
Publisher	Peter Davies
Publication date	1951
Media type	Print book (Hardback & Paperback)
Preceded by	To Love and Be Wise (1950)
Followed by	The Singing Sands (1952)

The Daughter of Time is a 1951 detective novel by Josephine Tey, concerning a modern police officer's investigation into the alleged crimes of King Richard III of England. It was the last book Tey published in her lifetime, shortly before her death. In 1990 it was voted number one in The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list compiled by the British Crime Writers' Association. In 1995 it was voted number four in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list compiled by the Mystery Writers of America.

Alan Grant, Scotland Yard Inspector (a character who also appears in five other novels by the same author) is feeling bored while confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. Marta Hallard, an actress friend of his, suggests that he should amuse himself by researching a historical mystery. She brings him some pictures of historical characters, aware of Grant's interest in human faces. He becomes intrigued by a portrait of King Richard III. He prides himself on being able to read a person's character from his appearance, and King Richard seems to him a gentle and kind and wise man. Why is everyone so sure that he was a cruel murderer?

With the help of other friends and acquaintances, Grant investigates Richard's life and the case of the Princes in the Tower, testing out his theories on the doctors and nurses who attend to him. Grant spends weeks pondering historical information and documents with the help of Brent Carradine, a likeable young American researcher working in the British Museum. Using his detective's logic, he comes to the conclusion that the claim of Richard being a murderer is a fabrication of Tudor propaganda, as is the popular image of the King as a monstrous hunchback.

The book explores how history is constructed, and how certain versions of events come to be widely accepted as the truth, despite a lack of evidence and/or any logical plausibility. Grant comes to understand the ways that great myths or urban legends are constructed, and how in this case, the victorious Tudors saw to it that their version of history prevailed.

The novel's title is taken from an old proverb ("Truth is the daughter of time") which is quoted by Tey as the novel's epigraph. Like all aphorisms this proverb has been directly quoted, paraphrased or enhanced many times over the centuries by multiple famous literate thinkers such as Aulus Gellius and Abraham Lincoln (direct quotes); Sir Francis Bacon (enhanced quote: "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority."); and Thales (paraphrase: "It is time that has discovered, or in due course will discover, all things that lie hidden.") to name just a few. Other famous quotes not unrelated to what Tey intended to communicate with her choice of epigraph and title would be: "Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true." - Richard Bach; "People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true." - Robert Ringer; "Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible." - Francis Bacon; and possibly even "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense." - Mark Twain.