*Please note this review contains spoilers*

A funny and thoughtful mashup of mystery and history and a reminder we shouldn’t take something as the truth just because we learned it at school – this book is a slice of magic. Tey opens with our detective, Alan Grant, studying the ceiling of his hospital room in boredom because he injured himself on his last case (and not in a heroic way either – he just fell). Rejecting the novels his friends have brought him for entertainment he only becomes distracted when a friend brings him a series of portraits of historical figures. He goes through them like a criminal line up and lands on Richard III, famous murderer of the princes in the tower. The thing is Grant’s detective gut says he doesn’t look like a villain, so he starts to investigate.

As a detective Grant knows how to investigate a crime, but without the ability to call in witnesses or examine the scene he has to change his procedures – so he turns to history books, starting with his nurse’s schoolbooks and journeying through secondary resources and ending with some primary documents courtesy of a young researcher at the British Museum.

Tey covers a ton of ground in a short text: how our memory of history is tied to later governmental action and political movement, how new information can always emerge to change how we consider the past, how we should always consider motive (not just in case of these particular murders but also in the sense of why someone is writing something).

So much of Grant’s research journey will be familiar to anyone who has relearned history at some point in their life. The detail that stuck out to me the most was Grant’s fury when he discovers Thomas Moore’s book about Richard III, written as an eyewitness account, is completely unreliable because Moore was a child when Richard was alive. His emotional reaction, and the fact he considers Moore a nemesis for the rest of the text, is both amusing (to think of a 1950’s detective picking a fight with Thomas Moore through history!) and relatable to any young historian who remembers the sting of the first historical trick they fell for.

Tey herself, although quite mysterious, was dedicated to rethinking Richard III. When the play she wrote on the topic didn’t go anywhere, she eventually wrote this book which cleverly combined her popular detective novels with her desire for readers to rethink the past. It was a hit and pushed the conversation about Richard III back into public thought. Tey is hardly the first to press for a reexamination of Richard III- her predecessors get a mention at the end of the novel and of course in the 21^st century the discovery of his body reignited the conversation again – but still the idea of Richard III as a murderer endures. (It really is very hard to battle Shakespeare in the public consciousness.)

At the very end of the novel, when Grant has his theory of the crime, he asks his nurse (the one who is most convinced of Richard’s guilt and who pointed Grant in Moore’s direction) to look again at his portrait. She does and finally sees him as a human rather than a historical figure. It’s a lovely moment just as Grant happily walks out of the hospital and leaves the world of history behind.

Unlike Grant I’m not in any hurry to walk out. As a reader I knew the second I closed this book that for many years to come I’ll pull this book off my shelf, open to the first page, and walk right back into Grant’s hospital room all over again.