When a person thinks of a detective and a historian, it is likely they see the former as an exciting person who does exciting work, and the latter as a stuffy person with their nose in a book, doing a terribly tedious job. What that person would be failing to realize, however, is that a great many similarities exist between the methods used in these two professions. Josephine Tey presents the parallels and the differences nicely in her novel The Daughter of Time, which explores the way in which Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard turns his detective’s mind towards a matter of history.
Both historians and detectives find their best, most trustworthy evidence from primary sources. For a detective, these can be eyewitness accounts or receipts. For historians, primary sources are produced at the time in question, and are things like letters and ledgers. In The Daughter of Time, Grant and Carradine’s some most useful sources were a letter written by Richard III and records from the time that weren’t intended as historical record.
Detectives most often do their work in the moment. They have a fresh look at events before most people have time to form their own strongly held ideas and convictions, and can look almost anywhere to find relevant information. Historians, however do their work looking back through a window. As time progresses away from the event in question, that window gets smaller and smaller, giving historians fewer options as to what occurred, barring the discovery of new information. Tey highlights this when Grant laments the fact that most accounts of Richard that follow the More account adopt the story without question until it is narrowed down into a simple tale of villainy in the child’s history book.
Despite that difference, which appears to give advantage to the detectives, both detectives and historians have to cross check and wade through dubious “facts.” Detectives can get false testimony from a spiteful witness, and historians can get bad information from a spiteful primary or secondary source. Histories very much reflect the time they were written—the Tudor historians mentioned by Tey vilify Richard III, and the Gospels (whether regarded as reliable histories or not) each tell slightly different stories depending on the people the authors were trying to reach in their respective time periods. Just like detectives have to be aware of “witnesses” who may have ulterior motives, historians have to realize that history may be exaggerated in favor of the author. Both detectives and historians look to similar places for facts and face some similar obstacles with them, but they are very much separated by the allowances of their respective time frames.
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