"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)

"Black Cake" by Charmaine Wilkerson

 When Benny and her big brother Byron attend the reading of their mother's will, they little realise that they will hear a story about a missing sister and a murder. Jumping backwards and forwards across time and from the Caribbean to the UK and to the USA, this novel reveals the secrets of the mother's (and their father's) past and, eventually, reveals whodunnit.

Although, close to the end, there was a moment when I got a lump in my throat, for the vast majority of this book I didn't really care about these people and their convoluted histories. I think the problem was this this was a novel driven first by issues (black men in the US fear the traffic police, black men get discriminated against at work, women are raped, women are coerced into relationships, women are sometimes forced to give up their babies, sugar is linked to slavery, foods that are seen as 'belonging' to a certain region often don't etc) and this led to the primacy of plot over character. A lot happens in this book. And because a lot has to happen there had to be a lot of characters. And because some of the characters have secrets, the story has to be told from a number of points of view (at least eleven of them get to speak). Therefore, the author has adopted the technique of 'head hopping': switching from narrator to narrator. The narrative is fragmented into a lot of very short sections, told from different PoVs. But, except for one or two moments when a specific word was dropped in, the voices of each of the characters sounded identical. The author tells us what is happening, sometimes she even explains the thought processes of the character narrating, but I never felt that I was inside the head of whoever was narrating; I never felt that I saw what was happening through the eyes of the character narrating, except in the most superficial sense.  And, as a result, I never felt that any character was at all real. That's why I didn't care about the characters and, this in turn meant that although I understood the arguments, I didn't have any emotional connection to the issues.

Several of the characters are, in any case, too good to be true. Of course Byron is "the African American social media darling of the ocean sciences" (he's also a "brainy athlete"). Of course one of his mother's friends becomes a world-record holder for endurance swimming. Of course his half-sister is another social media and TV star, this time for cooking, who wipes the floor on live TV with a "coffee guru". These are the sort of people we all meet every day of our lives.

Of course, it is a "New York Times bestseller": book buyers in New York don't seem to want character-driven narratives. It has a strong, fast-paced and intricate plot, but because of the thin and sometimes stereotyped characterisations, it lacked verisimilitude and I found it shallow and superficial.

The point was made in my book group that, despite being purportedly anti-racist, the image portrayed of the Chinese characters is negative and stereotyped, perhaps reflecting an unconscious bias on the part of the author.

Selected quotes:

• "Her satin-covered shoes lay strewn on the lawn outside like tiny capsized boats." (Prologue: Then 1965)
• "A chubby, squiggle-headed baby girl following him around the house" (Part One: Now: 2018)
• "The delicate mechanics of having to work for a living"
• "Eleanor had lied to her husband for all these years because she understood that is you wanted someone to keep loving you, you couldn't ask them to bear all of your burdens, couldn't risk letting them see all of who you were. No one really wanted to know another person that well." (Part Three: Decency)

June 2023; 416 pages (but actually shorter because of the fragmented narrative)

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Twyford Code" by Janice Hallett

 The book mostly consists of transcripts of recordings made by dyslexic ex-con Steve as he tries to solve the mystery of what happened to his remedial English teacher after he gave her a book by out-of-fashion children's author Edith Twyford. Steve's quest to crack a secret code he believes to be hidden in the book, is aided by his childhood friends from the same class and librarian Lucy.

It's an uneasy hybrid of the Da Vinci Code with Enid Blyton and for most of the story I was aware of gaping holes in the narrative - How could such a fundamentally simple code be successfully hidden from anyone? Who on earth ever published such tortured prose in the first place? Where did all the deus ex machinas who repeatedly rescue Steve from moments of peril come from? - and the fact that these are neatly resolved by the final twist did not make it easier to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the earlier part of the story. In the final analysis, this book is more a puzzle solving exercise than a novel and, to be honest, I couldn't be bothered to grapple with it.

Selected quotes:

• "Never been in a bookshop before, have I? Second-hand books. Smells like an old person's house. Shelves stacked to the ceiling. Accident waiting to happen." (Audio file 37)
• "When  you get what you want, you lose what you have." (Audio file 148)

November 2022; 388 pages

Winner of the British Book Awards Thriller of the Year 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Felicity Hunters" by Deirdre Connolly

Lara's grandmother was in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war; the first Lara hears of this is at her funeral. Lara determines to investigate her family history and her new job teaching in Singapore provides the perfect opportunity to meet relatives in Australia. But why are they hostile? And who is the person in the floppy hat who stalks her around the world? And what has all this to do with Lara's inherited trusteeship of a family charity?

This is a well-written first novel; a Robert Goddard style mystery (for example, Play to the End) in which the past exerts a long shadow over the present. It also gives a fascinating insight into the conditions faced by expatriate teachers in Singapore. There are some great descriptions:

• "The ebbing tide had created a canvas of yellow rippled sand sculptures around sapphire ponds" (C 5)
• "I pulled myself away and ambled deeper into the gorge, a living masterpiece with layer upon layer of interest, from birdsong echoing against the cliff walls to wallabies making fleeting appearances in the bushland bordering the contrasting Victorian gardens." (C 11)

And other great lines:

• "In my experience, people either want to talk about things like that interminably, or not at all." (C 3)
• "We sampled introductory offers at spas, enjoying hours of scrubs, massages and ginger tea until our bodies had no more toxins to surrender." (C 8)
• "The first splinter of dawn pierced the skies outside my window" (C 11)
• "You know that glow I always wear in Singapore, well that’s calories seeping out through my pores." (C 22)

Well worth a read. May 2019

"The secret rooms" by Catherine Bailey

In 1940, John, 9th Duke of Rutland, died alone in a draughty room off the servants' quarters of Belvoir Castle, a room in which he had lived and worked alone, more or less continuously, for two years. The rooms were then sealed for sixty years.

When Catherine Bailey gained access to them, to work on a history of the First World War, she discovered that John had been assembling, or perhaps dissembling, the family archives. Here were copies of all their letters. Except there were three missing periods within the records. From the evidence of the butterfly clips that held packets of letters together, the evidence for these periods had been removed by John, while he was compiling the archives.

The first relates to a time when John was eight and his elder brother died.

The second relates to 1909, when John was a reluctant diplomat in Rome.

The third relates to a period between July and December 1915 when John was in the British Army during the First World War. The third missing period corresponds exactly to the time when John's war diary suddenly goes blank.

What were the secrets hidden by the missing evidence? Were they all linked?

The start of this book reads like the most exciting thriller, perhaps a classic Robert Goddard such as Long time coming or Blood count. I am a fan of this genre. Bailey adds neat touches: she jumps around in time between the story of John and the story of her researches; her prose is sparse and matter-of-fact as if the mystery is quite the opposite; there is the wonderful moment when she leaves the allegedly haunted room in which the Duke died in search of a coffee, only to be surprised by a woman "in her early seventies and dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century parlour maid."

I could scarcely read this book fast enough. However, as we approach the end the story is marred by the endless quotations from family letters. Most of these letters help to add a little extra to the puzzle but they also contain many trivial details that are not necessary. In short, she could have shortened it.

And in the end, not all the details are resolved. Thus is real life unlike a thriller but it is unsatisfactory although it gives one the sense of enduring mystery and the hope that someone one day might resolve the remaining puzzles.

Nevertheless, this was a cracking read. May 2013; 425 pages

"Fault Line" by Robert Goddard

Another typical Goddard in a genre that is showing signs of aging. The main protagonist, male and disillusioned with life, is obliged to investigate events that took place a long time ago. The story jumps backwards and forwards in time as the elements of the mystery slowly knit together.

As usual, thoroughly readable, marred this time by the fact that the villain was obvious from the first pages. Unlike most Goddards there were very few double crosses and rarely was I wrong footed. Not all the mysteries were cleared up and one sub-plot was more or less entirely separate from the main body. In the final denouement the motives of the villain were still obscure and the only surprise twist at the end was the happy ending.

Not a classic Goddard but I still read it in just over a day.November 2012; 509 pages

"Outrage" by Arnaldur Indridason

Elinborg is a typical Reykjavik lady detective. With one failed marriage behind her she lives with her partner, Teddi, and their three children (eldest, a boy, is on the internet all the time and suffering teenage angst, youngest, a girl, is very gifted) whom she hardly ever sees because she works too hard. She has written a cook book.

 Every detail of her life is told to us in the stark prose of this latest exponent of Scandinavian noire.

In fact Indridason doesn't believe in the 'show, don't tell' principle of fiction. His prose is simple, flat and sterile. I have no idea what Elinborg looked like because the author doesn't really do description. The victim dresses in "black jeans, white shirt and a comfortable jacket"; neither description nor character are allowed to get in the way of the plot.

Compared to this book, Agatha Christie's characters are living, breathing and multi-dimensional.

It is a pleasant enough yarn. It rattles on. There is not the sense of clues being carefully dropped into the prose, each revelation is expected as it comes.

I was most interested in this book because I have been to both Reykjavik and Akranes but I think I might write with more local flavour having known Iceland for a whole five days.

Potboiler. September 2012; 386 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Lost City of Z" by David Grann

A true story which reads like an adventure from the pen of Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle.Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, one time spy and legendary British explorer of the Amazon jungle, travels with his son and his son's best friend into the rain forest in search of a mythical city which sounds like El Dorado but which he refers to as Z. The little party disappears. What has happened to them? Over the years many go to seek them; many fail to return. This brilliant book is a biography of the eccentric colonel, a history of white colonial exploration of the Amazon, an investigation into what might have happened to him, a search for Z, and a wonderful analysis of obsession.

If nothing else it has made me NEVER EVER want to venture into an insect ridden swamp. The list of predators was awesome. Not just hostile Indians with poison tipped arrows who seek to enslave you, or torture you, or kill you, or cannibalise you. Not just Piranhas but fish that lodge themselves into your ureter causing such pain that penilectomy is required. Not just mosquitoes and death from malaria but a bug that 'kisses' you on the lips inserting a protoplasm that, in the next twenty years, will cause your heart or your brain to swell fatally. Not just maggots who eat you from the inside out but vampire bats.

October 2011; 275 pages

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, that are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Devil and Sherlock Holmes" by David Grann

Twelve real-life stories of murder, mystery and madness. Sort of. Actually a remarkably eclectic collection which makes one wonder how one man, albeit writing for The New Yorker, can have found the time and sources to acquire such a miscellany. Even the title stores are as different as chalk and cheese: a 'was he killed or did he commit suicide?' puzzle about the wannabe biographer of Conan Doyle to an assortment of interviews with and biographical fragments of an exiled Haitian politician. In between we learn about an arson that wasn't and a criminal gang that terrorises US penitentiaries. My favourite story is the murderer who used the details of his unsolved crime as material for a bizarrely surrealist novel; this led to his eventual conviction.

A fascinating and unusual collection of articles.

September 2011; 334 pages

"The file on the Tsar" by Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold

This book tells the story of the killing of the Romanov's in July 1918 in a downstairs room at Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. Or it tells of the escape of at least the tsarina and her four daughters (the Grand Duchesses; the book is full of meaningless titles and reverence for aristocracy) and their removal to Perm, from where Anastasia escaped and was recaptured, and from where they were again taken never to be seen again. The book inclines to believe the second story.

Throughout there are rumours reported as fact, facts dismissed as rumours, selective choice of what to believe and character assassination of anyone who believed differently from the authors. Enigmatic pronouncements ("I don't have to see [the woman claiming to be Anastasia]; I know") are italicised and treated as statements of incredible historical importance; single discrepancies in witness statements are used to demolish everything else. For example, an odd scrawl on the massacre wall is revealed to b the letters LYS', written in mirror writing, clearly short for LYS'VA, one of the places on the way to Perm, even though the Russian alphabet is different from the English. Th eyewitness statement given by Medvedev is undermined because the witness was a red guard who gave himself up to the whites and then died during interrogation. Another contradictory statement is believed even though it claims to be written by a person who did not exist; the authors leap over this problem by claiming it was written pseudonymously.

Essentially this is a catalogue of evasions, rumours and contradictions through which they weave the path they clearly wanted to travel in the first place.

The third edition, however, deals in a postscript with the bodies that were found in the woods, whose DNA gave a 98.5% probability that they were Romanov. The authors start by dwelling on the possibility that Science has got it wrong; no less a person than a Russian Orthodox priest is quoted in support of this. They even find a scientist who claims that the techniques used only give a 70% chance. Clearly the fact that someone was shot in Ekaterinburg and that bodies were found in a wood nearby where peasants saw soldiers on the night of the alleged massacre and these bodies have been identified as the Romanovs would shoot even 70% chances up well beyond the 90% mark but this is still not enough for Summers & Mangold. They point out that only 9 bodies have been discovered and that the missing ones are the tsarevich and one daughter. They ride of triumphant.

I enjoyed reading the book; it is a real page turner. However, it is nonsense.

June 2010; 368 pages