In Josephine Tey’s 1951 murder mystery, The Daughter of Time, the protagonist, Scotland Yard detective Alan Grant, remarks, “The truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time; an advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.”
Louis L. Picone has proven himself to be a detective on par with Tey’s hero. His Grant’s Tomb is deeply researched, accessible, and gets to the truth about the largest crypt in the nation and its famous occupant, the 18th president of the United States.
Picone begins with a moving account of how Ulysses S. Grant spent his final days writing his memoir — with the help of Mark Twain — in a cottage in Upstate New York. We feel the great man’s life ebb as his body succumbs to the throat and tongue cancer brought on by his ubiquitous cigar smoking. Doctors had limited options for treating the former commander-in-chief, but they did their best to keep him free of pain. Picone writes:
“On June 16, 1885, as the temperature in New York City approached 100 degrees, an emaciated Grant emerged from his home at 8 a.m., bundled in a wool cap, coat, and scarf. This was the first time many reporters had seen him since the announcement of cancer several months earlier. ‘His body is wasted almost to a skeleton and the bones of his hands and wrists show through the tightly drawn skin,’ a journalist for the Salt Lake Evening Democrat grimly reported.”
