★★★☆☆ The psychology of Richard III

The Daughter of Time

Josephine Fey

For a novel billed as the "best crime novel of all time" (not a meaningless boast, see Wikipedia), Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time was a disappointment. I picked it up because of its appearance in Death at Morning House. It is the fifth novel in Tey's Inspector Alan Grant series, and I will not be reading any more of the series.

Inspector Grant is laid up in hospital and is bored out of his skull. (Been there, done that.) He becomes interested in the famous matter of the Princes in the Tower and, with the help of a young American history student, Brent Carradine, at the British Museum, undertakes to investigate the question. (May I just say how refreshing it is to read a novel by an English author that contains an American character who is both intelligent and pleasant, instead of the default stupid and obnoxious American.) What Grant and Carradine purport to discover is that historians are all idiots who know nothing about human nature or psychology, and that those who pin the murder of the princes on Richard III have gotten everything wrong. Have a quote

'Historians should be compelled to take a course in psychology before they are allowed to write.'
'Huh. That wouldn't do anything for them. A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn't write history. He writes novels, or becomes an alienist, or a magistrate—'
'Or a confidence man.'
'Or a confidence man. Or a fortune-teller. A man who understands about people hasn't any yen to write history. History is toy soldiers.'

The proposition that "A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn't write history" is, of course, utter nonsense. (Steven Pinker comes immediately to mind as one counterexample.) It is perhaps true that detectives, psychiatrists ("alienist" is an old word for that), magistrates, and con-men have a keen and accurate appreciation of human psychology.

You know who doesn't? Mystery writers. In the canon of Western literature, it is "poor characterization" when a person acts the way a real human being does. That is, a wise character who suddenly and without explanation does something stupid cannot be permitted in a novel. But wise men and women *DO*! All the time! It is a fact of life that historians, real-world detectives, psychiatrists, and probably con-men (can't say from my own experience) know very well. Many writers probably know it, too, but they are required by literary convention to suppress that knowledge in their work.

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