In her thoughtful and persuasive introduction to the Folio Society’s 2014 edition of Josephine Tey’s final novel The Singing Sands, the crime novelist Val McDermid makes a splendid case for Tey as the bridge between the Midsomer cosiness of Golden Age crime fiction and the harder-edged suspense novels of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. I enjoyed McDermid’s essay – her love for and knowledge of crime writing bleeds through into every piece of criticism she writes – but it leaves me perplexed. Why don’t I see what she sees? The Franchise Affair was published in 1948. 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?
Well, the Bronte masterpieces are in a sense fantasies, I hear you reply. Tey is writing about the society that surrounds her – she is reflecting reality.
OK then, I counter. But that reality comes across as pretty ugly, and I don’t see Tey putting up much of a protest about it. She is wonderfully witty in places, waspish even, and I’m all for that. What I don’t see is irony.
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The comparison with Midsomer Murders is not entirely spurious. The Franchise Affair is very much a small town mystery, with a restricted cast of characters and only a cameo appearance from Tey’s regular detective, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard. Our hero this time is Robert Blair, a somewhat unadventurous local solicitor. Unaccustomed to criminal cases, when one unexpectedly comes his way his first instinct is to push it off on the sharp-suited and (therefore) less scrupulous lawyer Ben Carley. It is only his growing admiration for one of the accused, Marion Sharpe – the damsel in distress, though to be fair Tey does make substantial efforts to portray her as anything but – that forces Blair to change his mind. How far this decision will affect Robert’s life in the long run is left to us to surmise. I did admire Tey’s courage in not providing a typical happy ending. If only she could have shown this kind of grit and ambiguity in more open confrontation of social norms.
Marion and her widowed mother are what are most usually referred to as distressed gentlefolk. They live at The Franchise, a house they have inherited from a distant relative at an inconvenient location some distance from town. As the novel opens, they have been accused of kidnap and abuse by a sixteen-year-old girl, Betty Kane, who swears blind the two Sharpe women abducted her from a bus stop, then held her prisoner at The Franchise in an attempt to force her to become their maid-of-all-work. Betty is well mannered and pleasing to the eye. What’s more, she can describe the house and the attic where she says she was held in every detail. Her case seems watertight. But Robert Blair cannot believe it – not Marion! – and his friend, the somewhat disreputable but nonetheless good egg Kevin McDermott, a London barrister, does not believe it either. How can the Sharpes possibly be guilty when Mrs Sharpe is the sister of the horse breeder who sold McDermott his first pony?? Together, they set out to Save the Women. And so the mystery laid before us is gradually revealed.
I’m being flippant of course, which is unfair to Tey. As a piece of mystery writing, The Franchise Affair is deftly woven, economical, entertaining, pleasing in its attention to detail and satisfying in the pulling together of its clues and leads. Why then does it have to be such a blatant and depressing exercise in class prejudice? Of course what Betty does is horrifying – but it is horrifying because it is deceitful, damaging and unheeding of the consequences for innocent people. Contrary to what the novel seems to suggest, Betty’s criminality is not the inevitable result of her being ‘no better than she should be’, the child of a mother who enjoyed ‘dancing with officers’ instead of scrubbing down the kitchen floor, presumably, and – oh my God, worst of all! – someone who openly and lasciviously enjoys a good meal. ‘Eating like a young wolf at my hotel’. Good lord, whatever next.
Betty and her deceased mother are portrayed as persons who are likely to go off the rails because they don’t know their place. Bad blood, in other words, and blood will out Similarly, the witnesses for the prosecution – a servant named Rose Glyn and a farm girl Gladys Rees – are variously described as ‘slut’, ‘moron’, ‘illiterate’, ‘little rat’ – all epithets casually thrown about by the fine, upstanding men who are defending the Sharpes – poor ladies – from the evil machinations of the lower classes. Even Ben Carley, the wide-boy lawyer from the wrong end of the High Street, with his ‘town clothing’ and his love of a risque joke, is shown in no uncertain terms as an arriviste and, to paraphrase Marion, ‘not our sort’.
I liked the portrayal of Marion and her mother – the mistaken ‘witches’ on the wrong end of a village witch hunt – but why does Marion’s hard-won pluck and insistence on her independence (Val McDermid is perfectly right about the way in which a woman like Marion transgresses the gender stereotypes of the period) have to be at the expense of every other woman in the book? Silly Aunt Lin, Bible-bashing Christina, Betty’s mother and of course Betty herself: she’s lost her parents in the Blitz, now she’s losing her step-brother as well. Of course she’s messed up, and is potentially every bit as interesting a character as Marion. Instead, Tey chooses to portray her – lipstick in pocket – as a painted whore.
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.
Yes, I’m disappointed. Maybe that’s unfair of me – maybe it really is impossible for a critic bitching in 2019 to properly grasp the rigid and unforgiving hierarchies of post-war Britain – and contrary to appearances I shall be reading more Tey. I’m intrigued by her odd, slightly off-kilter mysteries. In spite of my harsh judgement I can see, through the cracks, what she is driving at, and I want to see more. The thing that does terrify me is the thought of what I might find when I come to reread Dorothy L. Sayers. I devoured her books in my early twenties. They seemed to me then paragons of progressiveness and sardonic wit. What if I discover them to be full of the kind of unthinking bias that so thoroughly snarls up the workings of The Franchise Affair?
For now I shall put off the moment of truth, continuing in the hope that they are still perfect.