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Narrated by Karen Cass
Josephine TeyUnabridged — 5 hours, 58 minutes
Narrated by Karen Cass
Josephine TeyUnabridged — 5 hours, 58 minutes
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The fifth book in the Inspector Alan Grant series.
The Daughter of Time remains Josephine Tey's most enduringly popular mystery. Can a bed-ridden 20th-century detective solve a 500-year-old crime?
The murder of the young princes in the Tower of London in 1483 is the most notorious crime in English royal history. The prime suspect has long been Richard III, portrayed as a monster by everyone from early propagandists writing immediately after Richard's death to Shakespeare himself. In this, the book repeatedly voted one of the best mystery novels of all time, queen of Golden Age crime Josephine Tey tackles the question of Richard's guilt via her own celebrated detective.
One of the best mysteries of all time.
The unalloyed pleasure of watching a really cultivated mind in action! Buy and cherish!
Audio Partners has published an extensive list of unabridged audiobooks under the Mystery Masters series. This one is a digitally remastered version of Tey's riveting, intellectual mystery. Scotland Yard's Inspector Grant is confined to a hospital bed with a broken leg and wounded hip. With little to occupy his mind, he becomes engrossed with a portrait of Richard III, the supposedly evil English monarch who murdered his two young nephews to keep them from the crown. Grant is not so sure. Using historical text, conjecture and hearsay, he pieces together a different scenario than the one most generally accepted regarding Richard Plantagenet and the two princes in the tower. Jacobi is an exciting reader well matched to the material. Production values, unfortunately, are not what they could be. Jacobi is one of those actors who makes noises with his mouth, so we can sometimes hear him swallowing. Ambient noise is too readily heard when chapters end, and they often end too abruptly.
This is vintage in every sense…which has acquired cult status among thriller writers.”
[Derek Jacobi] reads as if he is sitting solo on a stage, speaking to an audience that has come to hear him solve this mystery. He talks to this audience. He talks to the other characters in the book. It is a complete performance.”
While Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard looks for a way to make his convalescence in a hospital bed less tedious, his eye falls on a portrait of Richard III. Grant's schoolboy memory of the king who murdered his two nephews suddenly sparks another line of reasoning for the misdeed, and the reader is treated to a new answer to the killings in the Tower. All of the action delights Derek Jacobi, who reads as if he is sitting solo on a stage, speaking to an audience that has come to hear him solve this mystery. He talks to this audience. He talks to the other characters in the book. It is a complete performance. The publisher has enclosed a card with a listing of several generations of Richards and Henrys and Edwards, which will be helpful to listeners who are not driving as they listen. J.P. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940159708199 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | SNR Audio |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2023 |
| Series: | Inspector Alan Grant Series , #5 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 606,304 |
Chapter 1
Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed around a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity. Why didn't he read? she asked. Why didn't he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on bringing him?
"There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought."
"You sound constipated," said The Midget.
The Midget was Nurse Ingham, and she was in sober fact a very nice five-feet-two, with everything in just proportion. Grant called her The Midget to compensate himself for being bossed around by a piece of Dresden china which he could pick up in one hand. When he was on his feet, this is to say. It was not only that she told him what he might or might not do, but she dealt with his six-feet-odd with an off-hand ease that Grantfound humiliating. Weights meant nothing, apparently, to The Midget. She tossed mattresses around with the absent-minded grace of a plate spinner. When she was off duty he was attended to by The Amazon, a goddess with arms like the limb of a beech tree. The Amazon was Nurse Darroll, who came from Gloucestershire and was homesick each daffodil season. (The Midget came from Lytham St. Anne's, and there was no daffodil nonsense about her.) She had large soft hands and large soft cow's eyes and she always looked very sorry for you, but the slightest physical exertion set her breathing like a suction-pump. On the whole Grant found it even more humiliating to be treated as a dead weight than to be treated as if he were no weight at all.
Grant was bed-borne, and a charge on The Midget and The Amazon, because he had fallen through a trap-door. This, of course, was the absolute in humiliation; compared with which the heavings of The Amazon and the light slingings of The Midget were a mere corollary. To fall through a trap-door was the ultimate in absurdity; pantomimic, bathetic, grotesque. At the moment of his disappearance from the normal level of perambulation he had been in hot pursuit of Benny Skoll, and the fact that Benny had careened round the next corner slap into the arms of Sergeant Williams provided the one small crumb of comfort in an intolerable situation.
Benny was now "away" for three years, which was very satisfactory for the lieges, but Benny would get time off for good behaviour. In hospitals there was no time off for good behaviour.
Grant stopped staring at the ceiling, and slid his eyes sideways at the pile of books on his bedside table; the gay expensive pile that The Midget had been urging on his attention. The top one, with the pretty picture of Valetta in unlikely pink, was Lavinia Fitch's annual account of a blameless heroine's tribulations. In view of the representation of the Grand Harbour on the cover, the present Valerie or Angela or Cecile or Denise must be a naval wife. He had opened the book only to read the kind message that Lavinia had written inside.
The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it.
Under the harsh shadows and highlights of Silas's jacket was an elegant affair of Edwardian curlicues and Baroque nonsense, entitled Bells on Her Toes. Which was Rupert Rouge being arch about vice. Rupert Rouge always seduced you into laughter for the first three pages. About Page Three you noticed that Rupert had learned from that very arch (but of course not vicious) creature George Bernard Shaw that the easiest way to sound witty was to use that cheap and convenient method, the paradox. After that you could see the jokes coming three sentences away.
The thing with a red gun-flash across a night-green cover was Oscar Oakley's latest. Toughs talking out of the corners of their mouths in synthetic American that had neither the wit nor the pungency of the real thing. Blondes, chromium bars, breakneck chases. Very remarkably bunk.
The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener, by John James Mark, had three errors of procedure in the first two pages, and had at least provided Grant with a pleasant five minutes while he composed an imaginary letter to its author.
He could not remember what the thin blue book at the bottom of the pile was. Something earnest and statistical, he thought. Tsetse flies, or calories, or sex behaviour, or something.
Even in that, you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about "a new Silas Weekley" or "a new Lavinia Fitch" exactly as they talked about "a new brick" or "a new hairbrush." They never said "a new book by" whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.
It might be a good thing, Grant thought as he turned his nauseated gaze away from the motley pile, if all the presses of the world were stopped for a generation. There ought to be a literary moratorium. Some Superman ought to invent a ray that would stop them all simultaneously. Then people wouldn't send you a lot of fool nonsense when you were flat on your back, and bossy bits of Meissen wouldn't expect you to read them.
He heard the door open, but did not stir himself to look. He had turned his face to the wall, literally and metaphorically.
He heard someone come across to his bed, and closed his eyes against possible conversation. He wanted neither Gloucestershire sympathy nor Lancashire briskness just now. In the succeeding pause a faint enticement, a nostalgic breath of all the fields of Grasse, teased his nostrils and swam about his brain. He savoured it and considered. The Midget smelt of lavender dusting powder, and The Amazon of soap and iodoform. What was floating expensively about his nostrils was L'Enclos Numéro Cinq. Only one person of his acquaintance used L'Enclos Number Five. Marta Hallard.
He opened an eye and squinted up at her. She had evidently bent over to see if he was asleep, and was now standing in an irresolute way -- if anything Marta did could be said to be irresolute -- with her attention on the heap of all too obviously virgin publications on the table. In one arm she was carrying two new books, and in the other a great sheaf of white lilac. He wondered
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