16/11/2025
In 1951, a female mystery writer used a detective novel to challenge 500 years of historical 'fact'âand convinced millions that one of history's greatest villains was innocent.
Josephine Tey had a problem with authorityâespecially the authority of accepted historical narratives written by men who'd never questioned their sources.
Born Elizabeth Mackintosh in 1896 in Inverness, Scotland, she chose to write under pseudonyms her entire career. First as Gordon Daviot for her plays, then as Josephine Tey for her detective novels. The reasons were complexâprivacy, the freedom to write across genres, perhaps the knowledge that women writers weren't always taken as seriously.
By 1951, Tey had established herself as one of Britain's finest mystery writers. But she was bored with the formula. Country house murders. Bumbling police. Clever detectives finding fingerprints and questioning suspects. She wanted to write something different.
Something that would challenge not just a fictional murderer, but history itself.
The Daughter of Time opens with Inspector Alan Grant laid up in a hospital bed, bored out of his mind. A friend brings him pictures of historical figures to occupy his time. Grant, a detective trained to read faces and assess guilt, becomes fascinated by a portrait of Richard III.
The man in the portrait doesn't look like a murderer. He doesn't look like the twisted, evil villain from Shakespeare's famous play. He looks thoughtful, even kind.
This bothers Grant. Because Richard III is "known" to have murdered his young nephewsâthe Princes in the Towerâto secure his throne. It's one of history's most infamous crimes, taught in schools, immortalized in literature, accepted as fact.
But what if it wasn't fact? What if it was propaganda?
Through Tey's detective, she began systematically dismantling the case against Richard III. Grant sends researchers to libraries. He reads contemporary accounts. He examines the timeline. He asks basic investigative questions that historians apparently never bothered with: Who benefited from the princes' deaths? Who had motive? Who actually had opportunity?
The answers were startling.
Richard III had little motive to kill his nephewsâhe'd already been crowned king, and the boys had been declared illegitimate. Killing them would only create martyrs and potential rallying points for rebellion.
But Henry VII, who defeated Richard at Bosworth Field and founded the Tudor dynasty? He had enormous motive. The princes were threats to his shaky claim to the throne. Henry married their sister to legitimize his ruleâbut that meant the princes, if alive, had a better claim than he did.
Henry VII also had opportunity. He controlled the Tower after Richard's death. He controlled who could investigate. He controlled the historical narrative.
And most tellingly, Henry VII never actually accused Richard of the murders during Richard's lifetime. The accusations came later, after Richard was dead and couldn't defend himself, when the Tudors needed to justify their seizure of the throne.
Tey's detective realizes what historians should have recognized centuries ago: the case against Richard III was built almost entirely on Tudor propaganda, written by people whose power depended on Richard being a villain.
Shakespeare's famous portrayal of Richard as a hunchbacked monster? Based on Tudor sources written to please Elizabeth I, Henry VII's granddaughter.
The historical "consensus" about Richard's guilt? Based on uncritical acceptance of obviously biased sources.
History hadn't been written by objective observers. It had been written by the winners, and the winners needed Richard to be a monster to justify their own seizure of power.
What Tey did was revolutionary. She took the methods of detective fictionâcareful examination of evidence, questioning of witnesses' motives, skepticism toward convenient narrativesâand applied them to accepted historical fact.
And she did it in a novel that became a bestseller.
The British historical establishment was not amused. Here was a woman, a fiction writer, questioning centuries of scholarship. Male historians who'd built careers on Tudor history dismissed her arguments. They said she was a novelist, not a historian, that she didn't understand the complexity of medieval politics.
But readers loved it. The book sparked massive public interest in Richard III. People began reading the actual historical sources instead of accepting what they'd been taught. Amateur historians formed societies to investigate Richard's reputation. The case for Richard's innocence gained serious academic support.
Josephine Tey had done something extraordinary: she'd used popular fiction to challenge academic authority, and she'd won the public debate.
The Daughter of Time is regularly cited as one of the greatest mystery novels ever writtenânot because of its plot twists, but because its central mystery is real. The Crime Writers' Association voted it the greatest mystery novel of all time in 1990.
But Tey's achievement goes deeper than solving a historical cold case. She demonstrated something profound about how we construct and accept "truth."
She showed how narratives become calcified into fact through repetition. How bias becomes invisible when it's held by those in power. How propaganda, given enough time, becomes history.
How rarely we question what we're taught simply because everyone seems to agree.
In 1951, a woman writing under a pseudonym used a bedridden detective to challenge 500 years of historical consensusâand millions of readers found her argument more convincing than the work of professional historians.
The ripple effects continue today. In 2012, Richard III's skeleton was discovered under a parking lot in Leicester. DNA testing confirmed his identity. The skeleton showed scoliosis (a curved spine), but nothing like the grotesque deformity described by Tudor propaganda. The battlefield wounds suggested he died fighting bravely, not fleeing cowardly.
Physical evidence was vindicating what Tey had argued in 1951: Richard had been maligned by people who needed him to be a villain.
When Richard III was reburied in 2015 with full honors, many credited Josephine Tey with beginning the rehabilitation of his reputation. A fiction writer's novel had literally changed how a nation viewed one of its kings.
Tragically, Tey died of cancer in 1952, just a year after publishing The Daughter of Time. She was only 55. She never saw the full impact of her work, never witnessed the decades of scholarship that would support her arguments, never knew that Richard III's bones would be found and would confirm her skepticism of Tudor propaganda.
She wrote eight detective novels in totalâa small output, but each one sharp, psychological, unconventional. She questioned authority in all of them, challenged comfortable assumptions, pushed boundaries.
But The Daughter of Time remains her masterpiece, not just as fiction, but as intellectual rebellion.
She proved that you don't need a PhD to question academic consensus. That fiction can be a vehicle for truth. That asking "who benefits from this story?" is always a valid question. That history deserves the same skeptical examination we give to crime scenes.
Josephine Teyâa Scottish woman writing under a pseudonym, outside the academic establishment, using the "lowbrow" genre of detective fictionâtook on 500 years of historical certainty.
And she won.
She didn't do it with credentials or institutional authority. She did it with logic, evidence, and the courage to say: "This story doesn't add up. Someone has lied to us. Let's find out why."
Male historians dismissed her.
The reading public believed her.
And sixty years later, when they dug up Richard III's bones, the evidence suggested the mystery writer had been right and the historians had been wrong.
Sometimes the most important mysteries aren't about who committed the crime.
They're about who's been lying about it ever since.
Josephine Tey asked that question in 1951.
We're still learning from the answer.
