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A fictional recreation of an eighteenth-century cause celebre.
Robert Blair is the middle-aged senior partner of a firm of country solicitors in the English Midlands of the late 1940s. His life is comfortable, well-ordered and predictable...until the day he receives a phone call from a woman, asking for his help. Josephine Tey was the pen name of the Scottish writer Elizabeth MacKintosh, who also wrote acclaimed plays such as Richard of Bordeaux, under the pen name Gordon Daviot. In 1929 she entered a detective novel,The Man In The Queue, into a competition, but it was another seven years before she would publish a follow-up, A Shilling for Candles. Both featured the gentleman detective, Inspector Grant, who cropped up in all but one of her books (and the one in which he does not is linked by another character). But it was not until after the Second World War that Tey began to publish -- in an all too brief flowering -- a half dozen of the finest crime novels of that period. During the space of few brief years she wrote Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar -- perhaps her finest novel, To Love and Be Wise, The Daughter of Time, and finally, The Singing Sands, published soon after her death in February 1952. The Franchise Affair is the updated re-enactment of an eighteenth century cause celebre. The phone call to Blair is from Marian Keys, a middle-aged spinster whom Robert is vaguely aware of from seeing around the town and at the golf club, and who lives out at an isolated house on the edge of town -- The Franchise -- with her widowed mother. When he asks her why she needs a solicitor, she says, "I'm supposed to have kidnapped someone." The someone is fifteen year-old Betty Kane, who has supposedly been held captive and made to work as a slave for several weeks. At first no action is taken against the women, but when a witness comes forward and confirms part of the girl's story, Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard has no option but to charge them. Robert realizes that the only hope for Marion and her mother is to find out what Betty Kane was really doing during the weeks that she was missing. Meanwhile the locals have taken against Marion and Mrs. Sharp, snr., and the battle lines are drawn in the local community. While there is never any serious doubt about the outcome, what Betty was really doing comes as quite a surprise, and to round the whole thing off, there is a beautifully observed autumn romance between Robert and Marion.
The copyright of the article The Franchise Affair in Modern American Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish The Franchise Affair in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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