“A Mystery Novel Like No Other Before.” On Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time

I wish I could remember when I first read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time—I must have been around twenty—but I certainly remember how much I loved it, which has only grown with every reread. I had already become a serious reader of crime fiction, immersed in the works of contemporary crime writers in addition to the usual Golden Age suspects like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Still, I simply could not comprehend how a mystery writer had produced a book like The Daughter of Time, one perfectly attuned to my love of research, that upended traditional historical wisdom without devolving into outright conspiracy theory. One that featured a wonderful array of supporting characters who only entered a single room to pay court to an ailing detective recovering from a broken leg, bedridden and confined to that space.

Imagine how it felt when readers first encountered The Daughter of Time in its year of publication, 1951. Detective fiction had certainly already bent traditional structures in all sorts of directions, whether through satire (think E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, published in 1913), narrative misdirection (Agatha Christie’s still hotly debated 1926 Poirot tale, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), tone (the hard-boiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Dorothy B. Hughes’s In A Lonely Place)—or by jettisoning order out of chaos altogether (any kind of noir, starting with James M. Cain’s 1934 debut, The Postman Always Rings Twice.)

But a novel like this? Where the detective, Alan Grant, is desperately bored, in need of something to occupy his brain because he can’t go out into the world to do his actual job? Where a question that haunted Britain for centuries—did Richard III really kill his two young nephews, the princes in the tower, in a single-minded late-fifteenth century quest for power?—is actually, credibly solved?

The Daughter of Time was a mystery novel like no other before, though plenty since have copied its irresistible structure: rather than a locked-room mystery in which the murder is an impossible crime, the detective is in (and becomes) the locked room, using cerebral means to reason his way into a solution to a genuine historical conundrum. It is, as the author Robert Barnard wrote, “an unrepeatable success,” one that has garnered innumerable accolades since its publication.

Some of those accolades: Anthony Boucher, in his Criminals at Large column for The New York Times, deemed the book “one of the permanent classics in the detective field…one of the best, not of the year, but of all time.” Dorothy B. Hughes, in her capacity as a critic, called it “not only one of the most important mysteries of the year, but of all years of mystery.” The Crime Writers’ Association in the UK named The Daughter of Time its number one choice in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time (1990), and Mystery Writers of America ranked the novel fourth in its own similar compendium in 1995.

If I ever get around to formulating my own Top 100 list, The Daughter of Time will rank near the top—not only for quality, but for the sheer number of times I’ve reread it in the quarter-century since my initial discovery. Why do I keep going back? For the wondrous rush of tagging along as a centuries-dormant mystery is revived again, but also the prospect of unspooling another mystery at the novel’s heart: one about the author herself.

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Let’s start with Josephine Tey’s name, which she adopted later in life. Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952), born and raised in Inverness, Scotland, took it from her great-great-grandmother (her mother was also named Josephine). Tey was not MacKintosh’s first pseudonym, nor the best-known during her lifetime; each name she took on carved out a different identity wholly separate from her initial self as Elizabeth, or Beth.

As Gordon Daviot, she wrote historical novels, short stories, poems, and radio dramas beginning in 1925, but her true calling was in playwriting. Her debut play, Richard of Bordeaux (1932), starring a young John Gielgud and a West End theater staple for the next two years, made Daviot famous—and it wasn’t exactly a secret that Daviot was a woman, whose face was sometimes advertised and who went about freely among friends under that name. Still, the Daviot pseudonym kept Beth MacKintosh deliberately under wraps. Daviot was all about performance; Beth stayed most of the year in Inverness caring for her ailing mother, and then, after her death, keeping house for her father.

This hadn’t been her original intention, of course—she’d left Inverness in 1914, at the age of eighteen, to work as a physical education teacher (an experience she would mine for the 1946 standalone Miss Pym Disposes). But the outbreak of World War I, losing an early love to the battlefield, and a powerful sense of duty brought Beth back to her hometown, to which she would stay rooted for the rest of her life.

Sequestered in Inverness, Beth still found a way to realize her writerly dreams, first as Daviot, and later as Josephine Tey. The latter pseudonym first emerged in 1936 with the publication of A Shilling for Candles—a follow-up to The Man in the Queue (1929), originally published as Daviot—but did not become her preferred publishing moniker for another decade, one which saw Beth visit her theater friends and peers in London, subsuming herself in a social whirl before returning to Scotland, where parental care and work—and a strong sense of privacy—took precedence.

This sense of compartmentalization is what drove Beth to invent her mystery-writing pseudonym. Tey could publish novels and stay out of the publicity fray, merely offering up an author photo (or not) and scant biographical details to readers chiefly interested in the books. Daviot, by contrast, grew under pressure to become more of a public figure thanks to the demands of the stage. This made her something of a slippery figure, in conversation with but set apart from her crime-writing contemporaries. Readers would have to be content with judging the works, and Beth, as Tey, made certain that these works would include carefully plotted narratives, evocative settings, and diamond-precise prose.

Consider the opening of The Daughter of Time, which sets matters up immediately and reveals Inspector Grant’s state of mind:

Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood: theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.

This paragraph lands with even more force after the pandemic year of 2020, when much of the world was shut inside, involuntarily educated on every facet, nook, and cranny of their living space. But anyone cloistered in convalescence will recognize the sense of tedium, the need to do something, anything, with one’s mind when all the usual methods have long since curdled, as a universal one. Even for those who had not encountered Inspector Grant in his prior outings—particularly his brief appearance in The Franchise Affair (1948) and To Love and Be Wise (1950), this paragraph makes clear this is a person worth spending significant readerly time with.

Thankfully, Grant’s friend, the actress Marta Hallard, lands upon a brilliant suggestion: if everything in the present is boring, why not venture deep into the past? A vexing historical mystery ought to do, and Grant lands on the story of the two Princes in the Tower, allegedly confined to the Tower of London in 1483 after the death of their father, King Edward IV and subsequently murdered by their uncle, Richard III, who soon ascended the throne—and made infamous for his supposed villainy in Shakespeare’s play more than a century later.

Grant is surprised at his own investment in solving the long-ago mystery, but “it did simplify things when you were just a policeman with a game leg and a concussed spine hunting up some information on dead and gone royalties to keep yourself from going crazy.” He even enlists a research assistant of sorts, the American academic and British Museum employee Brent Carradine, who is soon caught up in proving Richard III’s innocence as much as Grant is.

Together, the two men not only explore what they believe didn’t happen—that the Princes were killed during Richard’s reign—but also how history is constructed, propagated, bent, and stretched and sanded over so much that lies eventually become presented as truth. And Grant, so long a convalescent, confesses that he is finally “feeling like a policeman. I’m thinking like a policeman. I’m asking myself the question that every policeman asks in every case of murder: who benefits?”

Far too many of the history books he reads can be dismissed with the epithet “Tonypandy,” Grant’s word for the kind of historical confabulations that accrue over time. History is a milieu that Grant, even after he goes through his investigation and lands on his theory of what really happened, can never fully comprehend. So, he would “go back to [Scotland] Yard, where murderers were murderers and what went for Cox went equally for Box.”

That is Grant’s thinking. But is it Tey’s? Hardly so. The genius of her fiction, particularly the run of novels beginning with Miss Pym Disposes and ending with The Singing Sands, published a few months after her death in 1952, is how well they explore the ideas of narrative falsity and hidden truths, and the distance between the author and her characters.

The barrister’s dogged pursuit of what he believes to be a false rape claim in The Franchise Affair (1948) would sit uncomfortably today if there wasn’t the nagging sense that Tey herself is toying with the reader, inviting them to identify a little too closely with the barrister and not enough with the girl. Tey slyly reinvents the story of Martin Guerre, one of impostors and those who wish to believe in them, even when it leads to murder, in Brat Farrar (1949) while in To Love and Be Wise (1950), she explores the concept of gender fluidity with such subtlety and care that it serves as a potential clue to why the male-coded Daviot pseudonym was so important to her.

The Daughter of Time takes hidden truths to a new level, one infused with a sense of post-modern fun. As Tey’s biographer Jennifer Morag Henderson reveals in her exemplary 2015 biography, Grant knows about Richard III in the first place “because he saw Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux (four times).” Marta Hallard grows anxious at the lack of new work from a playwright “concentrating on her detective fiction.” Topics like Mary Queen of Scots and the Covenanters—subjects of a play and biography, respectively, by Daviot—are also discussed.

There is a sadder hidden truth as well: Tey wrote and published The Daughter of Time when she was becoming ill with cancer, a fact she revealed to almost no one at the time—leading to the shock of her friends and fans at her death on February 13, 1952. It was a life cut short, denying readers the more exemplary work Tey undoubtedly would have written had she lived longer.

But the work we do have, and particularly The Daughter of Time, shows a writer in deep communion with what she thought and how she thought about it. That is the truest gift Josephine Tey continues to give readers old and new, and what a delight is in order for those about to experience her voice and style for the very first time, as I did a quarter-century ago.

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Excerpted from Sarah Weinman’s forward to The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Forward Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Weinman. Copyright © 1951 by Elizabeth MacKintosh. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.