The Franchise Affair

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

After a reading of The Daughter of Time. I felt I wanted to explore Tey's detective fiction technique in a classic format.

First Edition Cover, 1948

An audio book; I find to my amusement that it is read by Carol Boyd, she of Lynda Snell.

Marion Sharpe and her mother seem an unlikely duo to be found on the wrong side of the law. Quiet and ordinary, they have led a peaceful and unremarkable life at their country home, The Franchise. Unremarkable that is, until the police turn up with a demure young woman on their doorstep. Not only does Betty Kane accuse them of kidnap and abuse, she can back up her claim with a detailed description of the attic room in which she was kept, right down to the crack in its round window.

But there's something about Betty Kane's story that doesn't quite add up. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is stumped. And it takes Robert Blair, local solicitor turned amateur detective, to solve the mystery that lies at the heart of The Franchise Affair...

What I thought:  A neat bit of detective writing with no resort to the artifices available to authors writing today, with all the available modern devices, techniques and such advances in the use of DNA and other evidence that is unwittingly left by perpetrators of crime.  Tey is upmarket Agatha Christie and I look forward to reading more titles in this genre.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Franchise_Affair

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

One of the good things about belonging to a book group is that, if run democratically, you will often find yourself reading books you would not have chosen for one reason of many reasons.  So with Rebecca which had slipped past me at various points in my reading life when I might have stumbled upon it.  For example at the time that we were taking annual holidays in Cornwall I found a copy of Vanishing Cornwall in a local bookshop and found it both informative and engagingly written: readable but writing of a very high calibre.  This was my first literary encounter with du Maurier.  I subsequently read The House on the Strand (written more than thirty years after Rebecca)which is a compelling read:

Wiki:  "Like many of du Maurier's novels, The House on the Strand has a supernatural element, exploring the ability to mentally travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand - but not to influence them. It has been called a Gothic tale, influenced by writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, and the psychologist Carl Jung, in which a sinister potion enables the central character to escape the constraints of his dreary married life by travelling back through time. The narrator agrees to test a drug that transports him back to 14th century Cornwall and becomes absorbed in the lives of people he meets there, to the extent that the two worlds he is living in start to merge. "

And then I found another title in second hand, A Cornish Childhood, by A L Rowse and then I moved on.

And now thanks to the Val de Saire book club I have met Rebecca.

Rebecca is a thriller novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier. A best-seller, Rebecca sold 2,829,313 copies between its publication in 1938 and 1965, and the book has never gone out of print. The novel is remembered especially^[1] for the character Mrs Danvers, the fictional estate Manderley, and its opening line:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

— The second Mrs de Winter

Literary technique

The famous opening line of the book "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." is an iambic hexameter. The last line of the book "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea" is also in metrical form; almost but not quite an anapestic tetrameter.

What I thought:

A novel that has never been out of print and sold nearly 3 million copies in the 30 year interval after its publication.  In 2017, it was voted the UK's favourite book of the past 225 years in a poll by bookseller W H Smith!!!

For me it started as a slow-burner of a novel. Mrs Van Hopper and her companion are staying at a hotel in Monte Carlo. Both these characters made me squirm a bit, Mrs Van Hopper’s shameless pushiness and the younger woman’s reticence and self-effacing manner. These are the opening chapters and then with the marriage of the young woman and Max de Winter the narrative takes off. Our ‘heroine’ was led like a lamb to slaughter. Du Maurier cleverly drew the creepily manipulative and poisonous Mrs Danvers well and the new young wife’s fearfulness and blind innocence at times made me want to shake the book at her! It was hard to feel sorry for her you just wanted her to show some mettle. She does finally gain confidence and become more assertive when Mrs Danvers is humbled. It was hard to warm to any of the characters except the man on the beach who refused to give up his secrets even though it was for fear of being locked into an asylum. 

Gradually the novel shifts from a psychological drama about obsession to a thriller: will the killer be unmasked and brought to justice. I thought this plot was cleverly written and at just the right pace. The twists with regard to Rebecca’s visit to the gynecologist and her confrontation with Max in the boat hut were clever. I did guess that Rebecca’s shooting was something which she engineered. 

A great ending to the book, rightly famous in the world of literature.

Two further comments: As the story reaches its climax I found myself wanting Max to ‘get away with it’. This sometimes happens when I read a book and a character is so obviously guilty but the author has contrived to make you engage with the guilty one. I think that is skillful writing because the author has manipulated her reader. Secondly it never occurred to me until I came to write this review that the second Mrs de Winter is never named. I went to the opening chapters to check what it was, assuming I had forgotten it, only to find we are never told. I wonder what prompted du Maurier to use that device? Perhaps it was to emphasize her identity as the second Mrs de Winter rather than a person in her own right and perhaps also to subordinate her to Rebecca whose ‘presence’ is constant and who is mentioned so often in the text."

The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

My niece came to visit me a month ago.  Like me, she is a veritable bibliophile and hunts along the shelves of bookshops in Paris where she works and lives, for books that will catch her eye for one reason or another.  She is on a voyage of reading discovery.

When she arrived she handed me two books, the first by Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, which I have reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  The second, by Childers, turned out to be a real discovery.  I emailed her as follows:


"I'm really into the Riddle of the Sands, love its gung-ho plot and somehow all that sailing technique does not get in the way.  I feel Childers is showing off, I assume he was a keen yachtsman.  Actually I am listening to it partially on Audible, read by Anton Lesser a vintage actor who is perfect in conveying a school boy earnestness for the adventure and he does an ace German accent.!"

Amazon says:  The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and television. While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers—who served in the Royal Navy during World War I—as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands accomplished that task and has been considered a classic of espionage literature ever since.

Wiki has a full entry on this book and I really recommend a reading of the background information given.  If you might be minded to read the book don't read The Plot section though!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Sands

A Duo of Police Procedurals

The Whistler by John Grisham

We expect our judges to be honest and wise. Their integrity and impartiality are the bedrock of the entire judicial system. We trust them to ensure fair trials, to protect the rights of all litigants, to punish those who do wrong, and to oversee the orderly and efficient flow of justice.

     But what happens when a judge bends the law or takes a bribe? It’s rare, but it happens.
     Lacy Stoltz is an investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. She is a lawyer, not a cop, and it is her job to respond to complaints dealing with judicial misconduct. After nine years with the Board, she knows that most problems are caused by incompetence, not corruption. 
     But a corruption case eventually crosses her desk. A previously disbarred lawyer is back in business with a new identity. He now goes by the name Greg Myers, and he claims to know of a Florida judge who has stolen more money than all other crooked judges combined. And not just crooked judges in Florida. All judges, from all states, and throughout U.S. history.
     What’s the source of the ill-gotten gains? It seems the judge was secretly involved with the construction of a large casino on Native American land. The Coast Mafia financed the casino and is now helping itself to a sizable skim of each month’s cash. The judge is getting a cut and looking the other way. It’s a sweet deal: Everyone is making money.
     But now Greg wants to put a stop to it. His only client is a person who knows the truth and wants to blow the whistle and collect millions under Florida law. Greg files a complaint with the Board on Judicial Conduct, and the case is assigned to Lacy Stoltz, who immediately suspects that this one could be dangerous.
     Dangerous is one thing. Deadly is something else.

My notes:  This is yet another typical procedural thriller.  We know the villain, it is a matter of how to set about catching them.   It introduces a feisty female detective, there is a Native American angle, and corruption on a mega scale set, as it is, in the current Trump era.  A body fairly early on, tells the reader there really is something to chase.  The very convenient paper tissue with the blood sample sets the investigation rolling.  But is rather boring, disappointing, procedural with no suspense or twists. All too real in these days where corruption prevails and if you are one of the powerful elite you get away with it.  I am reading this at the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  Nothing surprises me.  The greed of the judge is huge - emeralds, rubies, all that cash.  Greedy women.  Epilogue, with no twists but the character Myers who disappears early on turns up.  convenience of blood sample on tissue.

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Detective Renée Ballard works 'The Late Show', the notorious graveyard shift at the LAPD.

It's thankless work for a once-promising detective, keeping strange hours in a twilight world of crime.

Some nights are worse than others. And tonight is the worst yet.

Two shocking cases, hours apart: a brutal assault, and a multiple murder with no suspects.

Ballard knows it is always darkest before dawn. But what she doesn't know - yet - is how deep her investigation will take her into the dark heart of her city, the police department and her own past...

A new thriller introducing a driven young detective trying to prove herself in the LAPD.

Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she’s been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.

But one night she catches two cases she doesn’t want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her own partner’s wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the cases entwine they pull her closer to her own demons and the reason she won’t give up her job no matter what the department throws at her.

What I thought:
Call me a reading snob but I would never choose a Michael Connelly, this was the choice of fellow reader in my Splinter Book Group.  I did not want to read the book in truth, and I laboured through yet another police procedural as I saw it.  But there were some interesting slants, our protagonist Renee Ballard is banished to 'The Late Show' - the so-called Graveyard Shift, for making a complaint against a colleague.  And in Ballard we have a principled feminist, charismatic, her passion for surf-bording, her attachment to her dog Lola, staying at her grandmother's.   I can see she might get a champion's following as a for example has Jack Reacher.  The book closes on a subtle cliffhanger , that is a clever device.  I listened to this title on Audible, it was useful adjunct to ironing bed linen and gardening.