Please excuse the terrible punning in the title, but it was
all that sprung to mind. The "re-discovery" of Josephine Tey's book
in recent times has been met with mixed feelings on my behalf. I say mixed
because although the work is very original and interesting, it seemed to
disappear for a while. Now, with the huge resurgence of interest in Richard III
due to the exhumation of his body under a Leicester carpark and his reburial at
Leicester Cathedral with all the pomp he wasn't granted 500 years ago, Tey's
book is now popular once again. It's a case of geeky "So now you want to
read the book" from me. It defies the conventional and cynical belief that
historical retrospective detective novels need to be balanced with physical
adventure, best exemplified by the truly awful "Da Vinci Code".
However, at the risk of spoiling the novel's conclusion I am not in favour of
its conclusion and firmly in the corner of historian, Alison Weir (not to
mention Winston Churchill and my old English teacher!) I recommend Weir's
excellent primary source examination of the case of the murder of the children,
Edward V and Richard Duke of York, which I bought as "The Princes in the
Tower" and has since been republished as "Richard III and the Princes
in the Tower". Nevertheless, it still stands as a great work of fiction
and an exercise in historical research albeit with a faulty premise and
foregone conclusion derived from the hero's first impressions taken from a
portrait.
