The Franchise Affair by
Josephine Tey
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
This is technically an Inspector Grant novel, in that he appears in it, but he isn't the one really investigating, and for all the development he gets it could be any other Scotland Yard detective.
This is because the story is not proving that someone committed a crime, but that they didn't, which isn't what the police generally set out to do. A teenage girl, missing for several weeks, turns up disheveled and bruised at her home, and tells a story about being held captive in a distinctive house by two women, who she describes. Such a house, owned by such women, exists, and when a tabloid newspaper breaks the story they become the target of abuse and harassment.
Fortunately, when first interviewed by the police they called on the services of a middle-aged country solicitor from the nearby small town, where he works in an old family law firm, doing mostly conveyancing, wills and the like. This is fortunate for them in that, given the chance to break out of his mundane lifestyle, he becomes a surprisingly good amateur detective. He does eventually call in the services of a professional private detective, but most of the work is done by the lawyer, Robert. In the course of doing it, he falls in love with Marion, the daughter of the mother-daughter pair, who's around his age and, like him, has never married.
Marion's late father was one of those improvident men who crop up in English literature, always sinking money into some stupid scheme and never getting it back again, and although she and her mother have inherited a large, old, ugly house named The Franchise from a relative, they have little money. The house is also remote, and it's hard to get servants to come out to it, so Marion does much of the household work (shocking at the time for a woman whose origins are middle class, at least to other middle-class people like Robert's young law partner). This lends some credence to the teenage accuser's story that she was kidnapped in order to be forced to work for the two women.
The whole story turns on who people find credible and why. The teenager looks outwardly innocent, and easily cast in the role of a victim; Marion is dark-complexioned and looks "Gypsy." On the other hand, the teenager keeps reminding people with a wide experience of the world of some liar or wanton that they've known, and Robert and his law partner believe Marion and her mother immediately and unwaveringly. There's a strong vein of disdain for ordinary people who don't understand the difference between claims and evidence, and whose thinking is wooly generally; the law partner is engaged to the daughter of a bishop who always stands up for criminals and never seems to give any sympathy to their victims, except that in this case he does the opposite for some reason (probably that the girl is of a lower social class than her accused abusers), prolonging the public profile of the case. But everyone, Robert definitely included, is basing their assessment of where the truth lies on their estimation of people and their unconscious biases, at least until the facts can be unearthed; several people base their assessment on the colour of someone's eyes, generalizing about the type of personality that goes with a given eye colour.
It's a story that's, if anything, more relevant in these days of social media outrage than it was at the time of original publication, and it's this additional thought about people and issues, on top of solid storytelling, that takes it up to five-star level for me.
That's not to say that I necessarily agree with all of the ideas. Tey is coming from a conservative position, that criminals are criminal because they're ultimately self-centred, possibly having inherited that tendency from their parents. She pillories the bishop's belief that all criminality is produced by environment - the old nature-versus-nurture debate, in which the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, though I would put it slightly closer to the bishop's end of things given that criminality is more likely to occur where people have limited resources and few options. As a middle-class descendent of generations of (as far as I know) honest working-class people, I obviously don't believe that the working class are inherently and genetically disadvantaged - less intelligent, less capable, more likely to be criminals.
I also found that I predicted a couple of the story beats in advance.
(view spoiler)[As soon as the house was going to be left unattended during the trial, I knew it would be burned down, freeing Marion and her mother to go and live elsewhere. And I correctly predicted that Marion would turn down Robert's proposal of marriage. The reasons she gives may have been some of the reasons that the author never married, given how much thought seems to have gone into them. (hide spoiler)]It's in the lower portion of the five-star space, then, but it is thought-provoking and well done.
The Cornerstone Digital/Penguin edition has only a few errors in it, though it looks like the author had a persistent fault of writing "infer" (to reach a conclusion through indirect evidence) when she meant "imply" (to hint at a conclusion indirectly), and her original editor did not correct it. I noticed it in previous books as well. This edition also has an introduction, which I recommend skipping at least until you've read the book or even entirely; it's crammed with spoilers and tells you what to think about it, coming from a very modern viewpoint.
View all my reviews
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