Published in 1948, this is another sui generis mystery by Josephine Tey (author of Brat Farrar and The Daughter of Time, both highly enjoyable). My audio-version was expertly narrated by Carole Boyd.

Our central protagonist is the 40-something Robert Blair of Blair, Hayward, and Bennet, a firm of solicitors based in the English market town of Milford.


I'm slightly confused by the geography of The Franchise Affair, and different commentators have different interpretations. Suffice it to say Milford is in The South (like Winchester, which is where these pictures come from)

Into Robert's calm -- not to say dull -- life explodes Marion Sharpe. She and her elderly and acerbic mother have been accused by a young woman, the 15-year-old war orphan Betty Kane, of abduction and violence. The two women, says Betty, kidnapped her, imprisoned her in their attic, and starved and beat her, all with the goal of forcing her to become their household help. She describes their house and car with considerable accuracy. Yet Marion and her mother swear they know nothing of her.

Robert instinctively distrusts young Betty, and sets about disproving her story.



This is another of Tey's Alan Grant novels. But the detective-inspector's appearance here is very much a token one. It's Robert who bears the brunt of the investigation. And in the course of a well-paced, well-constructed story, he eventually prevails, and the Sharpes are shown to be the innocent victims of a cooked-up tale.

It's undeniably a good read. Things look very bleak for Marion and her mother for quite a long time, and you do occasionally wonder whether there's going to be a sting in the tail. But you want them to be exonerated, and they are.

One of the book's strongest features is its powerful evocation -- well before the days of electronic "social media" -- of the dangers of witch hunts, trial by media, and social persecution. The public, all riled up by opportunist publications and misguided "do-gooders", have very much adopted Betty's cause, and taken against the Sharpes, who, on the one hand, don't "fit" in the village (they're seen as odd and difficult; Marion is thin and swarthy, and her mother is sharp-tongued and eagle-eyed...), and on the other, are regarded as representatives of the "wicked rich". Actually, the women are far from rich (in fact they lived in a boarding-house in London until a stroke of luck bequeathed them The Franchise, the big, ugly house where Betty says she was detained). But, as far as the folks on the street are concerned, they're posh, and therefore fair game. So, with this accusation hanging over their heads, Marion and her mother are subject to verbal harassment and ostracism, and their house is bedaubed with insulting slogans, and subjected to vandalism and arson attacks. What Tey presents is far from an essentially bucolic scenario, marred by an isolated crime. Rather, she shows us a seething undercurrent of class-based mob violence, always ready to break the surface.



Ah yes, class... You never go far without it in the crime fiction of the early 20th century.

I wouldn't quite agree with Nina Allan that the book is "a blatant and depressing exercise in class prejudice". But there seems little doubt that Robert makes the leap of faith about the Sharpes -- despite the initial lack of any evidence in their favour -- because he sees them as "one of us".

And, as Allan points out, "The only ordinary working people that come out of this OK are those -- like Stanley who works in the garage and his own widowed mum -- who doff the cap with a smile and respect their betters."

More insidiously, you suspect that Tey's blithe disparagement of many of her female characters also has a class flavour.

True, Robert's uber-respectable Aunt Lin, aka Linda Bennet, is portrayed as lovable and dependable, but terribly superficial: She "led a life of recipes, film stars, god-children, and church bazaars, and found it perfect". Conversely, Mrs Winn, Betty's stepmother, whose circumstances are modest, gets plenty of respect: "She was slight and neat and young and modern and dark and pink-cheeked and still pretty, and had a pair of the most intelligent bright brown eyes Robert had ever seen."

But then there's Mrs Tilsit, the female half of the working-class pair with whom Betty goes to stay before her disappearance: She "was one of those women whose minds are always on something else. They chat brightly with you, they agree with you, they admire what you are wearing, and they offer advice, but their real attention is concentrated on what to do with the fish, or what Florrie told them about Minnie's eldest, or where they have left the laundry book, or even just what a bad filling that is in your right front tooth; anything, everything, except the subject in hand."

And Betty's late mother is really hauled over the coals. She's condemned as a loose-living, flighty woman, who was only too glad to send her child into the countryside during the war so that she could gad about with soldiers... According to a neighbour, she was "a bad mother and a bad wife".



As for Betty herself, we neither get to know her, nor find out what drives her. She's presented as nothing more than a nasty, conniving piece of work, whose elevation as heroine among the tabloid-reading public we are invited to distrust, and whose eventual come-uppance we are expected to applaud. Indeed, Betty invokes some positively sadistic feelings in the novel's most respectable characters.

Of course, it's a terrible thing to lie about people, and expose them to unjust punishment. But she's a kid... She was given short shrift by at least one parent; she was then orphaned; she was involved in an inappropriate relationship with a married man (and the onus, we would say, from our 21st-century viewpoint, is clearly on HIM to be the responsible adult); and she was physically abused by that man's wife.

So the animus against her does feel disproportionate, not to say cruel...

In the words of Charlotte Beyer, Betty, as "fille fatale" ends up at the end of the novel "slut shamed and punished". I wouldn't have put it like that, but yeah...



Wondering about these themes, I found this article by Sarah Waters very informative. Here I learnt that the book was inspired by a real case, that of the 18-year-old Elizabeth Canning who went missing for a month in 1753.

But Waters continues:

"Where the enigma of Tey's 18th-century model rests firmly on the issue of who in the case was telling the truth -- Elizabeth Canning, or her alleged abductors -- in The Franchise Affair the question of narrative uncertainty is opened only to be promptly closed down. The mystery is shifted entirely to Betty herself, to the questions of why she is making her false accusations and how she is able to substantiate them...

"The gadabout mother, the grime, the tea, the buses: the details code Betty as feckless working class, just as surely as the Sharpes' scuffed Hepplewhite chairs and fine sherry place them as shabby genteel. For a novel of this genre and vintage, that's perhaps no surprise... But what is most startling about the novel is the intensity of the hostility it mobilises towards Betty... [The book's] savagery began to make sense to me -- to feel less weird and random -- as I set the book alongside other 40s documents. I started to see how very precisely Tey had adapted the Canning story to meet the conservative middle-class concerns of the time, how closely informed the novel is by the specific moral panics -- about 'problem' children and juvenile delinquency, for example -- of postwar life."

While contemporary readers are unlikely to have known about Elizabeth Canning, they may well have been familiar with the wild career of another Elizabeth, the 18-year-old Elizabeth Jones, who, in October 1944, teamed up with an American army deserter for a six-day riot of robbery, violence, and murder: "The Cleft Chin Murder, as the case became known, is the one discussed by George Orwell in his 1946 essay Decline of the English Murder: for him, the killing typified a distinctly modern trend in which murder was the product of anomie and squalor, rather than part of the calculated drive for respectability it had been in the palmy days of poisoners such as Crippen and Mrs Maybrick. 'Indeed,' he writes, 'the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period' -- and, as he also points out, 'the brutalising effects of war' may have lent extra vehemence to the expressions of outrage that erupted when Jones was imprisoned rather than, like her male accomplice, executed."

For Waters, the war-exacerbated violence both of the crimes and the way the public reacted to them influenced The Franchise Affair: "Like Elizabeth Jones, Betty Kane is an inflammatory figure because she's such a powerful meeting point for anxieties about gender, sexuality and class -- all categories that the war had done a great deal to disturb... To those still traumatised by a postwar election that had thrown out Churchill's government and replaced it with socialists, the Britain of the late 1940s seemed a baffling and hostile place... It is this almost apocalyptic mixture of loss, rage and peril that underpins the conservative agenda of The Franchise Affair. For Tey, Betty Kane represents everything that's wrong with postwar life: no wonder the passions she provokes in the novel are so vastly out of proportion to her actual narrative presence."

Fascinating...



Three conclusions:

1. Nina Allan comments: "It would be easy to argue that it is more or less impossible for a writer and critic of my generation to properly understand the subtleties and subtexts of a novel that appeared almost twenty years before she was born. And yet still I am perplexed. Why does it seem to me that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights -- both published a hundred years before The Franchise Affair and long before any of the twentieth century’s social and cultural revolutions could reasonably have been imagined -- seem less straitjacketed by class prejudice and more feminist by far than anything I have so far encountered by Josephine Tey?" And she's right: This early crime literature, though fun, is frustratingly shot through with stuff that grates... But, like Allan, I will continue to read Tey. Next up, I hope, will be a more conventional Alan Grant novel -- one in which he is a) present for more than a few paragraphs; and b) not dealing with a case that's hundreds of years old...

2. Val McDermid is a big Tey fan. She extols "Tey’s role as a bridge between the classic detective stories of the Golden Age and contemporary crime fiction. She left the genre in a different place from where she found it and she cracked open a series of doors for others to walk through... Without Tey cracking open the door, I don’t know how easy it would have been for writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell to have begun their own explorations of the darker side of human identity and sexuality." So that's interesting. Was Tey a rampant conservative or a bit of a revolutionary? And should I not read something by McDermid?

3. I HAVE to read Sarah Waters' The Lost Girl, which drew some of its inspiration from The Franchise Affair...

You see how easily these things spiral out of control?