The Franchise Affair

[sawyl]

Since I seem to be writing up in publication order, I think that means it's time to put down a few thoughts on Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair. Set in an English village, it follows local solicitor Robert Blair as he finds himself caught up in a bizarre kidnapping case that finally gives him the focus that seems to have been missing from his life.

The novel begins when the phone rings just as Robert is about to knock off for the day. It is Marion Sharpe, a woman he knows by sight, who lives with her elderly mother in The Franchise, a large just outside the village. She has been accused of abducting and beating a schoolgirl and asks Robert to come and provide some friendly legal advice. Robert agrees and arrives at The Franchise and watches, baffled, as the girl, Betty Kane, describes the contents of the house and casually identifies the two Sharpe women as her kidnappers. Lacking any additional evidence, the police are disinclined to take the case further, but when Betty's cause is taken up by a crusading scandal sheet they find themselves forced to dredge up a case against the Sharpes.

Much of the driving force comes from the way the previously respectable characters find themselves caught up in events that seem to be careening out of control. Robert finds himself abandoning his lazy, contented existence. He starts working long hours and playing slueth to vindicate the Sharpes, spending his time trying trace Betty's final movements before her disappearance. Robert's great friend Kevin Macdermott KC also finds himself involved, acting as a sounding board and eventually agreeing to defend the Sharpes in court after being won over by Mrs Sharpe's surprisingly comprehensive knowledge of horseflesh.

Marion and her mother respond to the case with total amazement: they know that they haven't kidnapped anyone, but at every turn they seem to beset by evidence that seems to prove their guilt. As a pair of characters, they're rather engaging. Marion is acute and intelligent, uninterested in the boring things in life, like keeping house, but with a keen eye for details — Robert is surprised and impressed by the quality of The Franchise's wine cellar. Marion's mother is formidable and forthright. Like Marion, she is insightful with a knack for cutting to the heart of things — when she first encounters Betty's accusation, she scandalises Robert and the police by inquiring as to the state of the girl's virginity, raising a point that the male characters then spend the rest of the book scrupulously ignoring.

The mystery bubbles along quite satisfactorily before being resolved by a divine intervention: Aunt Lin prays for a witness and one shows up the very next day. When Robert pulls on this loose thread and pull, the whole case unravels. In a particularly good court scene Kevin Macdermott forensically eviscerates Betty's account of events, while Robert suddenly realises the terrible cost of their actions when he catches sight of the look of absolute horror on the face of Betty's foster mother, a woman he rather admires.

Re-reading The Franchise Affair for the first time since reading Sarah Water's The Little Stranger was struck by the similarity between the two: the brooding house, the mother and daughter caught up in a situation that seems to have escaped their control, and the stranger — in both cases a middle-aged professional from the village — brought in to provide assistance. This seems to have coloured my take on the book. I kept expecting it to shift into gothic brooding, a la Waters, only to be be secretly relieved when it stayed within the lighter bounds of Tey's detective fiction.