When a little free library opened a few weeks ago in my village I absolutely had to take a gander. With shops and libraries closed, this was the only way I could indulge in my favourite hobby of book browsing.
I thought I would come away empty handed but then, tucked away behind the multiple copies of James Patterson and John Grisham novels, I found two slim volumes by M C Beaton.
I’ve never read any of her Agatha Raisin series and probably wouldn’t have been tempted except it just so happened I was in the mood for something not too demanding.
And that’s exactly what I got. Book 1, Agatha Raisin And The Quiche of Death, and Book 13, Agatha Raisin And The Case Of The Curious Curate are both delightful escapist novels. I thought I would be mildly entertained but I wasn’t expecting to encounter books that were full of such sharp wit or to feature such an enjoyable non-PC character.
It’s the character of Agatha Raisin, a retired PR queen turned amateur sleuth. that makes the difference in this series. She’s absolutely the star of the show. Without her we’d just have pretty cottages, slightly amusing mysteries (nothing too gory or nasty) and quaint village traditions.
Agatha is definitely not in the Miss Marple mode. Instead of a neatly dressed, quietly spoken amateur sleuth with an acute understanding of human nature we get a brash and prickly career woman.
As the series opens, Agatha has decided to sell up her public relations company and move to a picturesque cottage in the Cotswolds. Accustomed to the buzz of parties and launches, she finds rural life is harder than she imagines. The locals in the village of Carsley are not hostile but don’t go out of their way to welcome her or include her in their social circle. Without friends and work, she quickly becomes bored.
No one asked her for tea. No one showed any curiosity about her whatsoever. The vicar did not even call/ In an Agatha Christie book the vicar would have called, not to mention some retired colonel and his wife. All conversation seemed limited to ‘Mawnin’, ‘Afternoon’, or talk about the weather. For the first time in her life, she knew loneliness, and it frightened her.
To stamp her mark on the village she decides to ingratiate herself with the locals to enter the annual ‘Great Quiche Competition’ . Never having baked anything in her life, she resorts to cheating, buying her ‘entry’ from an expensive London delicatessen. Unfortunately the competition judge dies after tasting her quiche. Agatha’s duplicity is revealed. Shame turns to anger when she is blamed for his death. It spurs her to turn detective and find the murderer herself.
Her methods are unorthodox and she finds herself in more than one scrape before the crime is solved. It’s great fun watching this woman’s inept attempts at detection and all the false trails she follows.
When I caught up with her again in Agatha Raisin And The Case Of The Curious Curate, it was to find that she’d become a fixture in the village. In the intervening years she’d married (twice). Husband number two has just dumped her; the launch she took on as a freelance project turned out to be dull and even her beloved London had lost its sparkle. So it’s back to the Cotswolds and those microwave meals for one.
The arrival of a new curate in Carsley is just the tonic she needs. Even though “she swore she would never be interested in a man again” Tristan Delon is a golden-haired, blue-eyed dish. He has all the ladies in Caswell swooning over him. After an intimate dinner for two in his flat, Agatha falls for his charms. she begins to dream of an exciting new adventure with a toy boy. Her dream doesn’t last long – the very next day the curate is found dead.
When the eye of suspicion turns on the Vicar, the husband of her best friend, Agatha sets off once more on the trail of a murderer. What follows is often hilarious as Agatha bumbles around following up on clues, worming information out of people and annoying the local police force.
Just like The Quiche of Death, in The Case Of The Curious Curate, MC Beaton delivers some deliciously funny scenes. Agatha has a penchant for causing mayhem as she lurches from one theory to another. Though she is so often rude and forceful, by the end of each novel, I did find myself warming to her. I loved the image of this champion of justice fretting about her weight before bunging another high calorie meal into the microwave before heading off in high heels and tight skirt, to do battle with the villain behind net curtains.
Would I read another book in the series? I might do if I were ever feeling a bit down in the dumps and in need of a pure entertainment. I have a feeling they would work really well as audiobooks so I’ll have to look out for them via my library’s digital service.
Reading Rather To Be Pitied brought on a wave of nostalgia for a delightful weekend I once spent amid the hills, dams and isolated farmhouses of mid Wales.
This is book two in a crime fiction series by Jan Newton which is set in the area near the market town of Rhyadar. It’s a tranquil region much loved by walkers and cyclists for its trails around six enormous dams that supply water to Birmingham. As impressive as they are, I was there for the birds – it’s one of the few places in Wales you can spot red kites that were on the verge of extinction not so many years ago.
In Rather To Be Pitied, the tranquility of this farming community is disturbed by the discovery of a woman’s body near a walking trail used by Benedictine monks in centuries past. It proves to be a complicated case for the newest member of the local police force, Detective Sergeant Julie Kite..
Though the woman is identified fairly quickly, there’s no sign of her young son. He’s not the only missing person. The dead woman’s former neighbour has left her home and husband. The landlady at the B&B where the murdered woman spent her last night, hasn’t seen her husband in quite a while either. Are the two disappearances connected? And what does all this have to do with some ex soldiers who are working at a local farm?
There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot to navigate before the answers are revealed.
The police procedural aspect is well handled though maybe edged a bit too close to the obvious. What I enjoyed most was the chance to see this part of Wales through the eyes of a newcomer.
Julie Kite was a copper in Manchester but found herself transplanted to an unfamiliar territory when her husband found a new teaching job in mid Wales. Life in her new home proceeds at a much slower pace than the high octane world of Lancashire policing. When you’re used to a battalion of emergency vehicles arriving on scene within minutes of your call, it’s agonising to wait for Welsh ambulances to negotiate slow country roads.
The challenges of rural life are compounded by the suspicion she encounters from one member of the police team. Then there are her own suspicions about her marriage. Is her husband’s former colleague stalking him with unwanted text messages or is there more to this relationship than he is letting on?
And then there are the complexities of the Welsh language. I enjoyed the running joke Jan Newton introduces based on the tongue-twisting nature of Welsh place names which seem impossible to pronounce:
She negotiated winding roads down into Newtown and on towards Welshpool where there were signs of life around the livestock market. Marchnad Da Byw y Trallwng. Where would you start with that? Which bit was Welshpool? She really ought to get around to learning Welsh …
But DS Kite finds there are some compensation as she tells her boss:
I love the way everybody knows everyone else and the fact that it’s completely silent at night. I love the views and the rivers and the way that people calculate journeys in minutes rather than miles.
I suspect that we’ll find that burgeoning appreciation for rural life will deepen as the series progresses. In a sense it has to in order for us to witness a maturing of the central character.
This was enjoyable read. Jan Newton describes the landscape and the local communities with the authenticity that comes from having driven those roads and met the inhabitants. It makes such a refreshing change to read a police procedural with a rural setting.
I also admired the dynamics of the police team. We get a jealous PC who resents the keen as mustard newcomer Kite and an energetic but kindly DI whose idea of investigation involves copious scones and cups of tea. The set up is complete with a fantastic forensic pathologist character in the form of a super smart and spiky woman who likes a tipple or two. As a Yorkshire lass, she knows how Kite feels to be an outsider.
Jan Newton planted two hints that the series could progress along a slightly different tack in future – one involving a hinted-at medical condition for Kite’s boss and another about her fascination for forensic pathology. It will be interesting to see if any of my predictions prove accurate.
The Book: Rather To Be Pitied by Jan Newton was published by Honno Press in 2019. They also published Jan’s debut novel (the first DS Kite mystery) in 2017.
The Author: Jan Newton grew up in Manchester and Derbyshire and spent almost twenty years in the Chilterns before moving to mid Wales in 2005. She has worked as a bilingual secretary in a German chemical company, as an accountant in a BMW garage and a GP practice and as a Teaching Assistant in the Welsh stream of a primary school, but now she has finally been able to return to her first love, writing.
She graduated from Swansea University with a Masters degree in Creative Writing in 2015 and has won the Allen Raine Short Story Competition, the WI’s Lady Denman Cup competition, the Lancashire and North West Magazine’s prize for humorous short stories and the Oriel Davies Gallery’s prize for nature writing.
Why Did I Read This Book?: I was in the mood for some crime fiction and saw this mentioned on the Honno website. It’s counting towards the “Wales” category in my #20booksofsummer 2020 project.
If you enjoy taut, high octane thrillers with good characterisation, Wicked Game by Matt Johnson is the perfect fit. Johnson takes us into the covert world of national security and intelligence services through the figure of Robert Finlay. He’s an ex SAS operative who thought he had left those days behind him, his past cloaked […]
Emma Kavanagh’s training as a psychologist is very much in evidence in her most recently published novel: To Catch a Killer. This is a taut thriller which features Detective Sergeant Alice Parr, newly returned to duty after a traumatic incident in which she almost lost her life in when her apartment caught fire. Seven months […]
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The fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago was the beginning of the end for one of the world’s most repressive intelligence and secret police agencies. For decades the Stasi spied on the population of East Germany using a vast network of informants to infiltrate every aspect of their lives and root out dissidents.
David Young provides a sinister reminder of this organisation and its methods in Stasi Child, the first title in a crime series set during the era of the Cold War.
On a cold winter morning in 1975, Oberleutnant Karin Müller, senior detective with the East German police force, is summoned to the Wall where the mutilated body of a young girl has been discovered. The official Stasi line is that the girl was shot trying to escape to the West but Müller quickly realises all is not as it seems. She’s particularly troubled to be told her inquiry should focus on discovering the identity of the girl rather than the identity of her killer.
Müller’s quest for the truth takes her on a clandestine trip into West Berlin, up snow-laden mountains and down into a secret tunnel running under the East-West border. At every turn she feels the dark and sinister presence of the Stasi. Their interest in her activities not only threatens to derail her investigation, it makes her fear for her future.
With tremendous attention to detail, Stasi Child shows the near impossibility of uncovering the truth in a society determined at all costs to prevent certain secrets ever being discovered.
Karin Müller is a savvy operator and a forceful character – you have to be pretty darn smart to become the highest ranking woman in the Volkspolizei. But she is not immune to the reality that in this society, her job, her security and her life are at risk if she is seen to over-step her authority or persue unhelpful lines of inquiry. Her vulnerability increases still further when her schoolteacher husband, is arrested after surveillance showed him meeting a a church pastor suspected of anti-communist beliefs.
This is a world where your neighbour can be ‘persuaded’ to become state informers, citizens are sent for ‘re-education’ in Communist values and young people made to endure the harsh regimes of state reform schools.
The bleakness of life in East Germany permeates the entire novel. For the citizens of East Berlin, the west is tantalisingly close but they’re not sure it is necessarily better. Can they trust what they have been told or is this yet another example of distorted truth.
As they entered the checkpoint, Muller glanced up the road past the barriers to the bustle of West Berlin beyond. She wondered if it really was as glamorous as the adverts on western TV made out. Or were Der schwarze Kanal’s accounts of strikes, homeless unemployed begging on the streets and ruthless greedy bosses nearer the truth?
One night in West Berlin opens Karin Muller’s eyes to the realities of life in the west. As part of her investigation she’s required to go shopping and to spend the night in a hotel. She relishes the variety and quality of the clothing available though is horrified by the cost. Once that geni is out of the bag it’s difficult to put it back in again.
In the office, she allowed herself one reminder of the West. She piled the shopping bags on the long table, under the noticeboard, and then lifted out the large shoebox that contained the boots. She opened it, and peeled back the protective tissue paper. Then she removed one boot, and caressed the fur-lined top, as though stroking a cat. A small touch of luxury. Then she looked up at the photographs pinned to the noticeboard. The dead, nameless girl without teeth. The girl without eyes.
Müller dropped the fur-lined boot as though it was infected.
The ambiguity of attitudes plus the atmospheric setting of the novel make Stasi Child stand apart from the thousands of police procedurals published ever year. The plot is satisfying enough, with plenty of twists and revelations though it’s not overly complicated. There’s added interest via another narrative strand from nine months earlier in a reform school where a teenage girl plots how she and her friend can escape. Karin Muller is a character whose vulnerability yet determination is engaging. But it’s really the dark portrayal of a society controlled by fear that was utterly gripping.
Stasi Child is the debut novel by David Young which won the 2016 Crime Writers’ Association Endeavour Historical Dagger for the best historical crime novel of the year. It was also longlisted for the 2016 Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. He explains the origin of his series in this interview
There are now four novels in the series with a fifth, Stasi Winter, due to be published in January 2020.
David Young became an author after a career in journalism and broadcasting. He now writes in his garden shed and in his spare time supports Hull City football club.
Today marked yet another attempt to bring some order to the chaos of my book collection. Thanks to a mini cull I can see some space on the bookshelves which is just as well because the piles on the floor are in danger of toppling.
Every time I do this exercise I make a discovery about my stock of “owned but unread” books. Today’s discovery was that I own a load more crime fiction novels than I expected.
It’s a surprise because, though I’m partial to a little crime fiction from time to time, I’ve never considered myself a huge fan.
I view them as entertaining, something I enjoy at the time, but not the kind of book that makes me think or that lingers in my mind long after I’ve got to the final page. Most of them are so forgettable that, were you to ask me to describe a particular book, I’d be in difficulties.
Those I do recall are memorable because the characterisation is sharp, the setting evocative and the narrative deals with interesting issues. Hence why I enjoy Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series so much.
Given all this, how have I ended up owning 22 crime fiction books?
Fortunately I can turn to the spreadsheet where I record all my purchases and acquisitions (gifts, donations, ARCs etc) to find some answers.
A few are parts of a series I’ve been following. That accounts for my copies of Nature Of The Beast and Bury Your Dead which are part of the series by Louise Penny I mentioned earlier.
It also accounts for In Two Minds by Alis Hawkins. It’s the second in her Teifi Valley Coroner series and I enjoyed the first None So Blind so much I had to get the follow up. I do need to read this soon however because there is a third book Those Who Can due out in May 2020.
Earlier this year I started reading a series by Abir Mukherjeeset in India at the time of the Raj. I must have been convinced this would be good because even before I read book one, A Rising Man, I had already bought books 2 and 3 and have an ARC of the fourth.
I can’t, at least not when it comes to books.
I volunteer at a National Trust property which runs a second hand bookshop as a way of raising funds. So of course every time I report for duty I just have to have a peek at the most recent donations.
The prices are ridiculously low – just £1 will get you a paperback in good condition (the volunteers who run the shop vet everything before it goes on the shelves). So hard to resist…..
Which is how I acquired two books by Jane Harper: The Dry and The Lost Man, both of which a friend had highly recommended.
A “two for the price of one” offer at The Works brought me Stasi Child, a debut novel by David Young which has won several awards. What attracted my interest was that it is set in the former East Germany during the time of the Cold War. I also bought the follow up Stasi Wolf.
I have a set of three books by Alexander Wilson that came as a discounted bundle from The Book People. Wilson was one of the pen names of Alexander Joseph Patrick “Alec” Wilson, an English spy and MI6 officer. I’ve no idea about the quality of the books; maybe their plots won’t be as interesting as the real life story of the author. After his death in 1963 he was discovered to have been a serial bigamist but then questions began about the true nature of his intelligence work.
There are some books I bought purely on the strength of reviews from other bloggers, mentions in social media and the occasional newspaper review. Unfortunately I failed to record the exact source of the recommendation – something I shall try to remedy with any future purchases.
Into this category falls Sixty Four by Hideo Yokoyama which revolves around the disappearance of two teenage girls 14 years apart. It was published with considerable buzz in 2018. It’s a massively chunky book , which is probably why I haven’t tackled it yet.
I also have Lewis Man by Peter May which is clearly a mistake because it’s book number one in a trilogy and I don’t have book one. So now I have to decide whether to go back to the beginning and add yet another title to my shelves…..
It’s going to take me a few years to work my way through all of these because I’ll space them out among other genres. If you’re a crime fiction expert maybe you can help me decide which of these to read first? And if there are any titles here that I could maybe give away…..
A Rising Man is the tremendously absorbing book that opens Abir Mukherjee’s vivid crime series set in colonial era India.
Mukherjee astutely delivers all the features you expect in a crime novel; (the carefully constructed plot, multiple false leads and dramatic incidents. But it’s the strong political and historical dimension that makes this murder mystery a highly entertaining read.
A Rising Man is set in 1919; a time when the splendour of the British Empire is beginning to fade in India. Political dissent is rising, the Quit India movement is gaining ground and a Hindu lawyer called Gandhi is advocating mass disobedience against new, more repressive British laws.
In the midst of this political maelstrom Captain Sam Wyndham arrives to take up a new position with the Imperial Police Force. It’s meant to be a fresh start for the former Scotland Yard detective. He survived the trenches of World War 1 but his hopes of a happy life were destroyed when his wife of only a few weeks, died from influenza.. Now the only way he can get through life is with a dose of morphine or opium.
Almost immediately on arrival in Calcutta he is plunged into an investigation into the brutal murder of a British burra sahib. It appears to be a politically motivated crime. For stuffed into the mouth of the dead man is a note: “No more warnings. English blood will run in the streets. Quit India!”
As his investigation proceeds, Wyndham, described as “a good man upholding a corrupt system”, is forced to make a choice between the necessity of maintaining law and order and his belief in the primacy of justice.
This is a man who is thoroughly disillusioned with the Empire and its assumption of moral superiority. What he sees in India is how the assumption enables third-rate business men and pen pushers to become wealthy and powerful while ignoring the poverty and filth of local inhabitants. “[T]he days were empty,” Wyndham says at the beginning of A Rising Man, “and the nights populated by the cries of the dead, which nothing could extinguish.
His second in command, Digby, is typical of the attitudes Wyndham encounters among fellow guests at his lodging house or in the military intelligence community. Digby has no qualms about the right of the British to rule and has nothing but disdain for the Indians. He is dismissive of the third member of the team – Sergeant “Surrender-Not” Banerjee – as “apparently one of the finest new additions to His Majesty’s Imperial Police Force … God help us.”
The relationship between Wyndham and “Surrender-Not” is one of the reasons A Rising Man is such a delight to read. They are an odd pair. Wyndham is a somewhat jaundiced, hard drinking man of action while Banerjee is a shy, earnest man who looks “more poet than policeman”. But they are united in their discomfort about the Empire and its future in India.
Through these two individuals Abir Mukerjee explores the complex dynamics of colonial Anglo-Indian relationships and the interaction between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surrender-Not forces Wyndham to realise that no matter how much he tries to shake off the British sense of superiority, he still falls short. After Surrender-Not saves his life he reflects:
I felt embarrassed. I was indebted to him, but somehow found it hard to say “thank you.” That was the thing about India. It’s difficult for an Englishman to thank an Indian. Of course, it’s easy enough to thank them when they do something menial, like fetch a drink or clean your boots, but when it comes to more important matters, such as when one of them saves your life, it’s different. The thought left a bitter taste in my mouth.
The relationship between Mukerjee and his assistant is a clever spin on the usual cop and side-kick formula. By the end of the novel they have moved into an apartment together (an arrangement that will surely raise eyebrows among the British) but you still sense that clashes of opinions lie ahead.
A Rising Man is an impressive first novel. Mukerjee’s colonial world is very well drawn contrasting the silver domed splendour of Government House and impressive buildings of Calcutta’s White Town with the open sewers and crowded alley ways of its Black Town district.
This vivid portrayal of a city combined with the fascinating historical background and some enticing flesh and blood characters, made this a completely absorbing book. I’m really looking forward to the next in the series.
Abir Mukherjee grew up in the west of Scotland. His love of crime fiction began when a friend introduced him to Gorky Park.
His debut novel, A Rising Man , was inspired by his desire to learn more about the India of his family. It won the Harvill Secker / Daily Telegraph crime writing competition in 2014. Since its publication, Abir Mukherjee has gone on to publish three more novels in the Wyndham and Banerjee series.
A Necessary Evil, set in 1920. It won the Wilbur Smith Prize for Adventure Writing in 2018. You can read part of the opening chapter here
Smoke and Ashes published in 2019 was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 Best Crime & Thriller Novels since 1945. Read the opening here
Death In The East will be published on November 14, 2019. It takes Captain Wyndham to Assam where he hopes time at an ashram will cure his opium addiction. He encounters a face from the past, a man he thought was long dead. Wyndham believes his life is in danger.
Sometimes a classic mystery or crime novel is the only type of book that will satisfy my mood. I don’t want the kind that oozes with blood or is ultra complex but equally the novel shouldn’t be ‘cosy’, or pedestrian.
Josephine Tey’s 1948 novel The Franchise Affair fitted my recent requirements perfectly.
It’s what I would class as an ‘intelligent’ mystery/crime novel. There are no bodies to be counted, no trail of blood, no criminals to be tracked down and unmasked in a grand dénouement (á la Poirot) and no unexpected plot reversals (á la Christie). Instead Tey presents her readers with a puzzle and invites them to follow along with the ‘detective’ as he seeks to find the truth among a knot of lies and inconsistencies.
The job of sleuth in this novel falls on the shoulders of Robert Blair, a respected solicitor in a respected family law firm in the country town of Milton. He’s called upon to defend Marion Sharpe and her mother who live in “The Franchise”, an imposing house on the outskirts of town.
They’re accused of kidnapping fifteen-year-old Betty Kane, holding her prisoner for a month and beating her when she refuses to do their cleaning. This is far from Robert’s usual kind of case but he’s been feeling lately that his life is rather unexciting and predictable. He’s rather taken with the Sharpe women and their sensible, forthright manner but he distrusts Betty’s story even though she can describe accurately items and rooms inside The Franchise.
Robert begins a painstaking search for clues that will prove his clients’ innocence and reveal that Betty is more of a cunning minx than the butter-wouldn’t-melt figure she presents to police and jurors.
The Franchise Affair is a cleverly paced novel. The first half is very much about Robert’s inability to find the holes in Betty’s story. Though he learns some surprising facts about her, he’s frustrated there is no real breakthrough. The second half has more tension; a race against time as the Sharpe’s find themselves arrested and the evidence appears to be firmly stacked against them.
Beyond the mechanics of the investigation lies a well crafted portrayal of how the media and a community react to a scandal in their midst.
Marion Sharpe and her mother were already viewed with suspicion in the town. They’re ‘outsiders’, for one thing and have acquired a reputation for being rude. The conservative townies think Marion looks like a gypsy with her dark hair, browned skin and colourful scarves. Perhaps, it’s whispered, they are witches…
The people of Milton find it easy to believe that these women who live in a ramshackle ugly house behind large gates, could be kidnappers and abusers. They find it equally easy to believe in Betty’s story, particularly when the girl’s youthful appearance and clothes makes even sober men think of “forget-me-nots and wood-smoke and bluebells and summer distances.”
This is a novel about the way people jump to conclusions. The townsfolk assume Betty is innocent because she looks that way and because she was orphaned during the war . They assume Marion Sharpe and her mother are wrong-doers because they live in a large house (hence must be wealthy) and are a little odd.
Tey clearly doesn’t have much time for people like this. But she is even more disapproving of the way the media feed their prejudices. One newspaper, the Ack-Emma is described as:
… the latest representative of the tabloid newspaper to enter British journalism from the West. It was run on the principle that two thousand pounds for damages is a cheap price to pay for sales worth half a million.
The Ack-Emma’s sensational headlines are instrumental in whipping up public animosity against the Sharpes. They take Betty’s story at face value, publish a picture of the Sharpe’s house (which then becomes a target for vigilantes) and allow abusive missives about the Sharpes to appear in their letters’ page. Tey’s narrator bemoans this new style of reporting. Time was, says the narrator, when newspapers could be relied upon to exercise sound judgement about the contents of their editions. But newspapers like Ack-Emma’ don’t confirm to those old principles.
However the narrator also acknowledges the Ack-Emma’s new style of reporting has clearly found favour with readers since sales had boomed and “in any suburban railway station seven out of ten people bound for work in the morning” were reading its pages.
The Franchise Affair is a darn good story pepped up with sparky social commentary. It also has some first class characters. Robert Blair is a joy as the lifelong bachelor with a peaceful life. He has tea and biscuits brought each day to his desk on a on lacquered tray covered with a clock. He can clock off work after the post has gone at 3.45pm, just in time for a round of golf before dinner. He’s also waited on hand and foot by a devoted aunt). I
His client ‘old’ Mrs Sharp is a fun character. Her acerbic tongue matches her name but she has has an equally sharp eye for spotting a winning race horse.
Pride of place however goes to one of the members of the supporting cast; Robert’s Aunt Linn: “a solid little figure with the short neck and round pink face and iron-grey hair that frizzed out from large hairpins.” She’s a woman perfectly content with her life which revolves around recipes, church bazars and film star gossip gleaned from magazines. Though she’s not too keen on her nephew taking on the Sharpe’s case because the people at The Franchise “aren’t the kind of people I naturally take to” she is one of the few people in Milton who doesn’t let appearances get in the way of a desire for justice.
Though there are aspects of The Franchise Affair that situate it in a particular period (a post-war England which still has the death penalty) it deals with issues that are still relevant today. Questions about media responsibility and accountability and the way communities take ‘justice’ into their own hands, are just as pertinent in 2019 as they were in 1948.
Josephine Tey was the pseudonym of Elizabeth MacKintosh who was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1896. She also wrote plays under the name Gordon Daviot, a surname that might have been chosen because it was the name of the place near Inverness where she spent family holidays.
Her first published work appeared under the name of Gordon Daviot in The Westminster Gazette in 1925. Her first mystery novel, The Man in the Queue, was published in 1929, marking the first appearance of Inspector Alan Grant from Scotland Yard. Grant makes a few brief appearances in The Franchise Affair.
Why I read this novel
I read and enjoyed another of Tey’s novels, The Daughter of Time in 2017. It’s an unusual novel, an investigation into the mystery of a historical event (the deaths of the Princes in the Tower). I was taken by her writing style, enough to want to read more of her work and luckily found a copy of The Franchise Affair in a charity bookshop. Incidentally this novel was included in a list of recommended crime novels published by The Sunday Times.
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