The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Inspector Alan Grant is stuck in hospital with a broken leg, so his friend Marta, knowing his interest in physiognomy, brings him a some pictures of historical characters to see if any of them suggest a mystery for him to unravel. The picture of King Richard III catches his eye - everyone knows that Richard III was a BAD KING who murdered the princes in the tower? It's there in the history books that we all studied at school, in black and white.

He starts his investigation with a school textbook, helpfully provided by one of the nurses looking after him, which confirms his memory, before moving on to more scholarly tomes including the supposedly definitive History of King Richard III written by the saintly Thomas More which all seem to support the accepted narrative. Case closed, until he realises that More was writing during the reign of Henry VII and had only been a child during the brief period that Richard was on the throne. His account could therefore not have been first hand, and was certainly written with the approval of the current monarch in mind, who would have been flattered to have his claim to the throne strengthened and his predecessor rubbished.

Everything in that history had been hearsay. And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than another it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Grant enlists the help of Brent Carradine, an American researcher at the British museum, to uncover contemporary accounts and references. Grant approaches the case as a policeman, asking the crucial question - who benefits from the crime? He examines the means, motives and opportunities to see how they stand up to the evidence, such as it is, before making his conclusion.

This was was an interesting book, digging into an area of history that I had only dimly been aware of. It contrasts the case of Richard III with more recent historical events such as the Tonypandy riot in 1910 where the commonly accepted narrative - in that case that Winston Churchill had ordered the army to open fire on striking Welsh miners - does not match the actual historical record. As the title of the book paraphrases the quote, "Truth is the daughter of time, not authority"

It is a truism that history is written by the victors, even more so in our current era of fake news and alternative facts, so being able to look beyond clickbait headlines and AI summaries is more important than ever. I wonder if this book might have been better as a straightforward non-fiction documentary account (or even a contemporary true crime style podcast) given that some of the sources that our fictional detective calls on (including a romantic historical novel called The Rose of Raby) are themselves fictional. It does allow the author to present her case at one remove. The theory that Richard III was innocent was not original, even in 1951 when this was written, but still controversial enough to earn a slap down from Winston Churchill (him again) in his History of the English Speaking Peoples.