"The Franchise Affair" by Josephine Tey

An elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter are accused of having abducted and beaten a girl who went missing from her home for four weeks. The girl is able to describe aspects of her imprisonment that match the details of a house she has supposedly never seen. Can a middle-aged solicitor with no experience in criminal cases prove that the girl is lying?

The crime mystery novel was rated as 11th best of all time by the Crime Writers' Association.

The story is based on the case of Elizabeth Canning, a girl who went missing in January 1753 and accused two women of abducting her. 

It is an enjoyable read; the mystery plot parallelling the understated romance between the solicitor and the younger of his clients. All the characters are carefully drawn although my favourite is the old lady. The one aspect that didn't work for me - but this is common to many novels of this period - is the concept that baby-blue eyes mean one is over-sexed, or that eyes set far apart make one a liar. Such ability to read character from a face seem to be persistent fossils of phrenology and about as reliable. If criminals all looked the same, wouldn't the job of the police be so much easier?

Selected quotes:

• “Childhood’s attitude of something-wonderful-tomorrow persisted subconsciously in a man as long as it was capable of realization, and it was only after forty, when it became unlikely of fulfillment, that it obtruded itself into conscious thought, a lost piece of childhood crying for attention.” (Ch 1)
• “Bert deserved better out of life than a good-time wife and a cupboard-love kid.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Haven’t you got a wife?’ Marion asked. ‘Not of my own,’ Stanley said demurely. (Ch 12)
• “They say that horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.” (Ch 14)

January 2026; 254 pages

First published by Peter Davies in 1948

My Penguin paperback was issued in 1985

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Josephine Tey crime novels:

• The Man in the Queue also published as Killer in the Crowd, originally written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot (1929)
• A Shilling for Candles (1936)
• Miss Pym Disposes (1946)
• The Franchise Affair (1948)
• Brat Farrar also called Come and Kill Me (1949)
• To Love and Be Wise (1950)
• The Daughter of Time (1951)
• The Singing Sands (1952)