Tale as Old as Time

Inspector Alan Grant is sick in a hospital bed, through the magic of a plot device. (I believe it was a broken leg, but I don’t know why this would require such an extended stay in hospital.) Anyways, he is bored, bored, bored… with nothing to do, he is encouraged to take a look at some famous historical riddle and try to solve it from his bed. And so he becomes fascinated with the figure of Richard III, and decides to investigate whether the king really was the heinous killer of the Princes in the Tower.

It seems that everyone everywhere is in love with this book, and with Josephine Tey in general. Interest in Tey and this book surged with the discovery of Richard III’s bones. Because the ghost of Harry Stephen Keeler was still active in the blogosphere at the time, the news story hit just a few days after I’d finally purchased a copy of this book, intending to read it. But because a lot of people who had no idea what they were talking about suddenly became authorities on King Richard, Tey, and GAD in general, I decided to wait for a while.