RogerBW's Blog

Fifth, roughly, of Tey's novels of Inspector Alan Grant, but not detective fiction in the conventional sense. Stuck on his back in hospital after being injured on the job, Grant becomes bored, and finds himself looking into the murder of the Princes in the Tower.

Of course, this is not scholarship, for all it's presented as such. The root of Grant's puzzlement is in his vaunted ability to read faces (which comes out in other Tey too, notably The Franchise Affair), leading him to feel that this portrait of Richard cannot be the face of a great monster. Tey clearly believed in being able to diagnose criminality from physiognomy, and while it's not as blatantly dated as racist asides would have been, it leaves someting of a sour taste to this modern reader. (And this is a portrait, not a photograph…)

While there was undoubtedly real research behind the writing of the book, Tey has selected her material to make this function as a work of fiction, from the first seeds of doubt to the collapse of the conventional narrative and finally the resolution that even if the mainstream historical version is rot the convenient legends are never going to be eliminated. Sometimes it's just a bit too contrived, a bit too certain that the good people are always honest and the bad people are always lying.

On the other hand it clearly brought the matter to the attention of many people who would never otherwise have thought of reading historical revisionism. I barely know enough history to say "hang on a minute" (the book's Wikipedia page gives a decent summary of its arguments and some of their problems), but taken as a narrative it's still well worth reading.

Freely available in Canada at Faded Page.