The 2021 Johnny Bingo Award

 As faithful followers (both of you) of The Johnny/Bingo Awards know, this is a somewhat haphazard accolade.

Presented to the best books I’ve read this year (regardless of when written), there is very little order to the affair.  Sometimes I have 5 finalists and pick awinner.  Or I’ll select multiple books indifferent categories.  I occasionally skip a year…or a decade.

But this year I’m going to write about a single book, as it happens the last book I finished in 2021.  Without further ado, the Johnny Bingo Award for 2021 goes to:

The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey

“When the Legend Becomes Fact, Print the Legend” – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

If you know my reading habits, you know my passions include history, Shakespeare, and a cracking good mystery. Josephine Tey, nom de plume for the Scottish author Elizabeth Mackintosh, brilliantly combines these elements in this, her most revered novel.

There is a fourth passion of mine that elevates this book from a great mystery to a miniature masterpiece.  I love books that examine how history and its telling evolve through the ages.  Was there a Trojan War?  Were Caesar and Marc Antony captivated by Cleopatra - and vice-versa - or was it realpolitik? Did Washington actually stand in that boat as it crossed the Delaware?

It’s why I’m so fascinated by Arthurian legend.  If there was an Arthur, he certainly wasn’t King of England – a place called England wouldn’t exist for 500 years after the first Arthur stories.  An Arthur, if he existed at all, was likely some sort of local warlord who may (or may not!) have briefly been part of a Romano-British alliance that only briefly held off the Saxon invaders.  And, you know, it’s unlikely there were wizards and magic swords and dragons. 

And yet, stories of Arthur are still everywhere.  Not only in recent films and television series and books that tell and re-tell the stories in different ways, but in some of the most popular stories of our time. Indeed, see how often Merlin is reborn  – as Dumbledore, as Gandalf, as Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

Where was I?  Right, The Daughter of Time…

“Determined to Prove a Villain” – Richard III

Few writers have shaped how we remember history better than Shakespeare.  Even residents of bookless houses, if they know nothing about Julius Caesar, know “Et tu Brute” and ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears”, and “Beware the Ides of March”.  But none of these words come from ancient Rome…they come from Shakespeare’s rendition of it.

So, too, the villainy of Richard III.  As written by Shakespeare (and played by such modern actors as Denzel Washington, Kenneth Branagh, Ralph Fiennes, Ian McKellen, Alec Guinness [two Merlins!], and more), Richard III is the villain of villains.  A hunchbacked monster, he frames his brother, steals the crown, and most notoriously murders his nephews – the infamous Princes in the Tower - to keep his throne.

Or did he?

Historians have long wondered if perhaps Shakespeare didn’t exaggerate the King’s lesser qualities – in part to tell a wonderful story (don’t let facts get in the way of a good story and all that), but also to flatter the Tudor monarchs of his time.  It was Henry Tudor, after all, that defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, establishing the monarchy.

Indeed, quite recently, the body of Richard III was foundbeneath a car park in England – and after exhumation and DNA confirmation, we learned that (among other things) Richard was not quite as deformed as Shakespeare wrote – and many pompous actors have played – him.

“Truth is the Daughter of Time” – Francis Bacon

Josephine Tey doesn’t need me to extol the virtues of her novel.  In 1990 it was voted the best crime novel of all time by the British Crime Writers' Association.  The Mystery Writers of America put it in the 4 slot.  This is the mystery novelists’ mystery novel.

Without giving too much away, a Scotland Yard detective, convalescing in a hospital bed in the middle of the 20^th century, gets interested in the murder of those nephews – the fabled Princes in theTower.  Something doesn’t add up to him.  With the help of an eager young American, he purses this 500 year-old murder case as a way to keep boredom at bay. 

It’s a marvelously original novel, and one that accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of creating suspense out of the idea of a guy in a hospital room trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.

From what I can tell, Josephine Tey truly did not care about actual accolades during her lifetime, so she certainly wouldn’t give a flying fig about a fake accolade 70 years after her death – but Congratulations nonetheless!