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Monday, February 27, 2012

Rejoicing - Daughter Of Time

I got the ebook! Josephine Tey's wonderful Daughter of Time is now mine to read on my iPad. I first discovered this when I was in Year 11,courtesy of a very good English teacher, who told us about it while we were studying Shakespeare's Richard III. The novel was published in 1951 and its hero, Inspector Grant, who was also the hero of a number of more standard crime novels, is stuck in hospital. He's bored ... until he's given a mystery to solve: was Richard really the monster he was portrayed? Could the man in that portrait have killed the Princes in the Tower? And if he didn't,who did? Did anyone? With the help of a lot of books and a keen young researcher, Inspector Grant investigates a truly cold case and comes up with an answer. This is the book that inspired me to join the Richard III Society, and I bet it inspired plenty of others too. At Aussiecon III, we had what was meant to be a wake for Richard(it wasn't, as the hotel wouldn't let us bring drinks and charged too much to supply them). People came in costume and white roses were hard to come by in Melbourne that day. I ended up buying a plastic one with branches on it, allowing me to share. I still have a photo of me in costume with my white rose. Later, when I went to England, I wore my Richard badge at a Blake's 7 convention in England on October 2nd and was delighted when someone saw it and said,"oh, yes, it's his birthday,isn't it?" SF fans do also love their history. And it was all because of a slim whodunnit, in my case...

2 comments:

UrbanDragon said...

I loved The Daughter of Time. It's one I hope I can get the kids to read because there's a lot to learn from it.

Cheers

Sue Bursztynski said...

Your kids are great readers, Morva, but you might have to do some background with them first. :-) otherwise, they might ask why they should care about a man who's been dead for over 500 years. And I must admit, I got some strange looks from folk when I explained that the RIII Society was a Richard fan club.;-) the point of the book is a bit more than that, though.