After reading The Daughter of Time, it becomes clear that there are many similarities between being a detective and being a historian. These similarities include the shared idea that history is an account of everything that has occurred including actions and events while searching through literature, lectures, and film. Both a historian and detective must also rely on records or artifacts in order to gather enough information on the past and reconstruct. History is often described as a reconstruction and the act of selecting, analyzing, and writing about the past. This becomes clear in the novel when protagonist Alan Grant decides to research the historical mystery of King Richard III. Grant decides to pursue this mystery because, after first reading about King Richard III, he is intrigued by his photograph. By the end of the novel, the audience sees Grant embody a detective. Throughout the novel, Grant also researches other events that happened around the same time period of his subject and found the case of the Princes in the Tower. At that section of The Daughter of Time, it became clear that a historian and detective must be familiar with other events that have similarities with the subject at hand because that can add additional clues in explaining the actions or outcomes of their subject.

The detection method is often compared to the historical method because detectives and historians must gather facts from unreliable sources and create their own account of what happened, who was involved, and what the outcome was. One difference between detection and history is that detectives handle incidents that occurred in the recent past while historians gather information from a much larger time frame. This is an important factor because detectives can work with crime scenes, which they use as evidence. Historians rely more on artifacts including books and previous accounts to help them get to a conclusion. The most important difference between the detective and historian method is that historians draw conclusions from an event that happened in one time period and will compare it to other historical eras in history in order to gain additional insight while detectives move from case to case individually, sometimes citing previous cases. The detection and historical methods are often compared because both methods have similar definitions and utilize the same strategies to reconstruct events that happened in the past.