11/12/2025
In 1951, a female mystery writer used a detective novel to prove that historians had been wrong for 500 years—and in 2012, they dug up the skeleton that proved she was right.
Her name was Josephine Tey. And she did something revolutionary: she used the methods of detective fiction to solve a real historical mystery that male historians had accepted as fact for centuries.
The Woman Who Questioned Everything
Elizabeth Mackintosh was born in 1896 in Inverness, Scotland. She chose to write under pseudonyms her entire career—Gordon Daviot for plays, Josephine Tey for detective novels.
The reasons were complex: privacy, freedom to write across genres, perhaps the knowledge that women writers weren't always taken as seriously as men.
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.
She wanted to write something different.
Something that would challenge not just a fictional murderer, but history itself.
The Portrait That Didn't Make Sense
"The Daughter of Time" opens with Inspector Alan Grant laid up in a hospital bed, bored out of his mind recovering from an injury.
A friend brings him pictures of historical figures to pass the 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, hunchbacked villain from Shakespeare's famous play. He looks thoughtful, intelligent, even kind.
This bothers Grant. Because Richard III is "known" to have murdered his young nephews—the Princes in the Tower—to secure his throne in 1483. It's one of history's most infamous crimes. Taught in schools. Immortalized in literature. Accepted as absolute fact.
But what if it wasn't fact?
What if it was propaganda?
The Detective Investigation of History
Through her bedridden detective, Tey began systematically dismantling the case against Richard III using the same methods police use to solve murders.
Grant sends researchers to libraries. He reads contemporary accounts. He examines timelines. He asks basic investigative questions that historians apparently never bothered with:
Who benefited from the princes' deaths?
Who had motive?
Who actually had opportunity?
When did the accusations first appear?
The answers were startling.
Richard III had little motive to kill his nephews. He'd already been crowned king. The boys had been declared illegitimate by Parliament. Killing them would only create martyrs and potential rallying points for rebellion.
But Henry VII—who defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and founded the Tudor dynasty? He had enormous motive.
The princes, if alive, had better claims to the throne than Henry did. Henry married their sister Elizabeth to legitimize his shaky claim—but that meant the princes were direct threats to his rule.
Henry VII also had opportunity. After Bosworth, he controlled the Tower of London where the princes had last been seen. He controlled who could investigate. He controlled what got written down.
And most tellingly: Henry VII never accused Richard of murdering the princes during Richard's lifetime.
The accusations came later. After Richard was dead and couldn't defend himself. After the Tudors needed to justify their seizure of the throne.
The Propaganda Machine
Tey's detective realizes what historians should have recognized centuries ago:
The entire case against Richard III was built on Tudor propaganda written by people whose power depended on Richard being a villain.
Shakespeare's famous portrayal of Richard as a hunchbacked monster? Written during the reign of Elizabeth I—Henry VII's granddaughter. Based entirely on Tudor sources designed to please the Tudor monarchy.
Sir Thomas More's "History of King Richard III"—the primary source for most historical accounts? Written under Henry VIII, and More never even witnessed the events he described.
The historical "consensus" about Richard's guilt? Based on uncritical acceptance of obviously biased sources written by the victors.
History hadn't been written by objective observers. It had been written by the people who murdered Richard and needed him to be a monster to justify their own actions.
What Tey Did Was Revolutionary
She took the methods of detective fiction—careful examination of evidence, questioning witnesses' motives, skepticism toward convenient narratives—and applied them to accepted historical "fact."
She asked: "Who benefits from this story?"
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. She was a novelist, not a historian. 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—the Richard III Society was founded in 1924 but gained massive momentum after Tey's book. 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 Legacy
"The Daughter of Time" is regularly cited as one of the greatest mystery novels ever written—not 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":
How narratives become calcified into fact through repetition
How bias becomes invisible when 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
The Vindication
Tragically, Tey died of cancer in February 1952—just one year after publishing "The Daughter of Time." She was 55 years old.
She never saw the full impact of her work. Never witnessed the decades of scholarship that would support her arguments.
Never knew that sixty years later, they'd find Richard III's bones.
August 2012. Leicester, England. A car park.
Archaeologists discovered a skeleton under the pavement. DNA testing confirmed the identity: Richard III, last Plantagenet king of England, killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.
The skeleton showed scoliosis—a curved spine—but nothing like the grotesque hunchbacked deformity described by Tudor propaganda.
The battlefield wounds suggested he died fighting bravely, not fleeing like a coward as Tudor sources claimed.
Physical evidence was vindicating what Tey had argued in 1951: Richard had been systematically maligned by people who needed him to be a villain.
When Richard III was reburied in Leicester Cathedral in March 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.
What She Proved
Josephine Tey proved several things that matter far beyond Richard III:
You don't need a PhD to question academic consensus.
Fiction can be a vehicle for truth.
Asking "who benefits from this story?" is always valid.
History deserves the same skeptical examination we give crime scenes.
The "lowbrow" genre of detective fiction can accomplish what "serious" historians won't.
She was a Scottish woman writing under a pseudonym, outside the academic establishment, using a genre male critics dismissed as trivial.
She took on 500 years of historical certainty.
And she won.
Not with credentials or institutional authority. 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.
The Lesson
Here's what makes Tey's story so powerful:
She understood something that academic historians had forgotten: that history is written by winners, and winners lie.
That "accepted fact" often means "convenient narrative that no one bothered to question."
That authority and truth aren't the same thing.
That sometimes outsiders see clearly precisely because they're outside the system that depends on the accepted story.
Every time someone questions an "established fact."
Every time a woman's perspective reveals what male authorities missed.
Every time "lowbrow" popular culture challenges "highbrow" academic consensus.
Every time we ask "who benefits from this narrative?"—
We're following Josephine Tey's example.
1951 to 2012 to Today
In 1951, a female mystery writer published a detective novel arguing that historians had been wrong about Richard III for 500 years.
Male historians dismissed her.
In 2012, they found Richard III's skeleton under a parking lot.
The physical evidence supported what she'd argued six decades earlier.
She never knew she was right. She died in 1952, one year after publication, believing she'd asked important questions but might never know the answers.
But she was right.
The historians who dismissed her were wrong.
And today, her novel is taught in universities as a masterclass in both detective fiction and historical methodology.
The Most Important Mysteries
Josephine Tey proved that sometimes the most important mysteries aren't about who committed the crime.
They're about who's been lying about it ever since.
And that solving those mysteries doesn't require academic credentials or institutional authority.
It requires asking the right questions:
Who benefits from this story?
Why do we believe this?
What evidence actually exists?
Who wrote the history, and what did they have to gain?
She asked those questions in 1951.
We're still learning from the answers.
And somewhere, I like to think Josephine Tey—who died believing she'd written an interesting novel that challenged conventional wisdom—would be amazed to know that when they finally found Richard III's bones, the skeleton vindicated her detective work.
The fiction writer was right.
The historians were wrong.
And history itself had to be rewritten.
Not bad for a woman using a "lowbrow" detective novel.
