The Franchise Affair
If you like mystery novels, be prepared for spoilers ahead — though I try not to be too explicit, I still give a lot away.
The Franchise Affair (1948) is a mystery novel by Josephine Tey, one of the most remarkable writers ever to work in that genre. (She’s also something of a mystery herself. She was a Scot whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh — “Josephine Tey” was just one of her pseudonyms — who worked in London for much of her adult life, and . . . not much else is known about her.) The Franchise Affair is a modernization of one of the great “true crime” stories of the eighteenth century, and is generally considered one of the classic mysteries.
However, recently in the Guardian Sarah Waters — an interesting novelist herself — offered a strong dissent from the usual view. While admitting that “in some ways Tey’s retelling of the Elizabeth Canning story is a quite brilliant one,” Waters is “mystified and appalled” by the general tenor of the story, which, in her reading, is driven by a particularly ugly form of British class warfare: it’s a “bilious, bigoted” tirade against the manners and morals of the unruly working classes.
And you know what? I think Waters nails it. I read The Franchise Affair just a few months ago, and I found it much less satisfying than some of Tey’s other work, but I didn’t describe it to myself in the terms that Waters uses — I was thinking more of the way that mysteries tend to work. In this novel, the protagonist is a small-town solicitor named Robert Blair who, though not a specialist in criminal law, takes up the cause of two local women, an elderly mother and her middle-aged daughter, who are accused of kidnapping a teenage girl and forcing her into slavery in their house, until after a month of misery she manages to escape.
Right from the beginning, Blair — who doesn’t know any of these people at all — determines that the mother and daughter are innocent and that the girl who accuses them is a lying, scheming little bitch. He never wavers in this view of the case, even when evidence seems to be strongly against his new friends, and in the end . . . he is proven to be precisely right.
That was what threw me. Blair was so certain, I felt that Tey was — perhaps over-obviously! — setting the reader up for a reversal. But the reversal never came. All Blair’s instincts were right all along. The “mystery” of the book turns out to be the explanation for the girl’s lies, and for their plausibility. And while the late revelations of the girl’s real story are well-handled, that just wasn’t what I was expecting — or not all that I was expecting.
There are some other things that are strange about the story. At the darkest hour, Blair’s aunt says she will pray for an angel to come and set everything right, and the very next morning a man comes to Blair’s office with information that reveals all and eliminates the clients’ danger. It’s almost as though Tey is playing with her readers — almost as though The Franchise Affair is a po-faced, deeply ironic parody of the genre.
But Waters’s essay gives a much more plausible explanation for the book’s strangeness — alas: I was enjoying my speculations about its irony. Class-based angst can make a writer do some strange things.
The Franchise Affair is very much worth reading, though — all of Tey’s novels are interesting for reasons unrelated to what mysteries usually do. I think the best of them is her last, The Singing Sands, though The Daughter of Time — in which her detective Alan Grant lies in a hospital bed and tries to figure out whether Richard III really murdered the little princes in the tower — is justly famous.
(Cross-posted at Text Patterns.)
Is it necessary to read the other Inspector Grant stories in order, or are they all near-stand-alones like The Daughter of Time?
— Tom Meyer · Aug 5, 04:57 AM · #
I’ve only read The Daughter of Time, so all I can do I second the recommendation, it was outstanding.
— eric k · Aug 5, 06:41 AM · #
I went through Josephine Tey’s mysteries a few summers ago, picking up a few I’d missed in earlier days. I like them for the atmosphere of that place and time. There were some surprisingly savage emotions evoked among some of the characters in the books. I can’t remember much about this one.
Ongoing political upheavals reveal I have some class-based angst myself. Maybe I would identify with the author of this affair.
— Julana · Aug 5, 12:51 PM · #
Fortunately, they can be read in any order.
— Alan Jacobs · Aug 5, 12:54 PM · #
I’ve got to say I wasn’t that bothered by the lack of surprise in the plot. Tey was simply working within the conventional plot where somebody holds to their convictions and is ultimately vindicated. Blair has enough doubts along the way to make it interesting. So, oddly enough, telling us that Blair is vindicated isn’t that much of a plot spoiler. It’s a given of the genre.
Waters is definitely right about the politics of the book—the book is basically a meditation on the threats to stable farming communities in the aftermath of World War II, the rise of youth culture, socialism, etc. As an historian, I have to say that Tey does a remarkable job of conjuring up a particular historical moment. Since we’re giving things away here, I’ll just say that neither Alan nor Sarah Waters noticed the complexity at the end—the Sharpes light out for Canada and Blair follows. So, at precisely the moment when the middle classes seem to have shown they can withstand all this, Tey indicates this way of life may not have much of a future in Britain.
As for Tey’s books, some are better than others. My favorite is “Brat Farrar.”
— Boz · Aug 5, 01:40 PM · #
That reminds me a bit of how I felt after finishing Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness. I never expected to find a Sayers book so infuriating that I would throw it across the room. SPOILER AHEAD, of course.
It was an okay mystery (Lord Peter is his usual entertaining self), but the resolution involves a member of the aristocracy escaping all the consequences of an extramarital affair with a peasant woman, whose life he endangered because she had a murderously jealous husband. This is portrayed by Sayers as a good thing for everyone concerned. The peasant husband is an absolute caricature, and somehow that’s supposed to make the Duke’s action all right.
— Ethan C. · Aug 5, 05:25 PM · #
Boz: I think it depends on which genre. In the mystery, it’s almost universal for the obvious answer to be held out before us for a long time and then at the end snatched away.
Ethan: Yes — and just as bizarre is another Sayers novel, which shall go nameless, that concludes in this fashion:
WIMSEY: I’ve nabbed you, old man.
CRIMINAL: Yes, I guess you have. But it would be terrible to go to jail, or be executed!
WIMSEY: Well, old boy, you could always do away with yourself, or let someone else kill you.
CRIMINAL: Thanks!
I mean, what the — ?
— Alan Jacobs · Aug 5, 06:10 PM · #
“In the mystery, it’s almost universal for the obvious answer to be held out before us for a long time and then at the end snatched away.”
That’s usually true, but there’s also the Perry Mason-type mystery; no one ever thinks Perry’s client could be guilty.
Not to be PC, but I recall that the book (and some of Tey’s other books as well) contained numerous gratuitous potshots at the Irish and (although she herself was of partially Scottish descent) the Scottish as well. One of the characters on the right side (not the main protagonist) is Irish, but even he is said to have relied on “Celtic charm” rather than heard-headed Anglo-Saxonism.
— James Kabala · Aug 7, 01:04 AM · #
P.S. The Daughter of Time seemed convincing to me at the time, but I don’t think most historians take the arguments in it (which are actually regurgitations of arguments by previous authors rather than original claims) very seriously.
P.P.S. It’s been so long since I read the Sayers novels – which one ended with that “Go and kill yourself” advice?
— James Kabala · Aug 7, 01:14 AM · #