Recently, someone commented on an old review of A Shilling for Candles and recommended that I also read The Franchise Affair. Apart from My Brother’s Killer, I haven’t read a Golden Age mystery in a while so I was eager to do so.

And wow, The Franchise Affair was intense! I pretty much gobbled this one down, compared to My Brother’s Killer and Murder Before Evensong – both mystery books that I read recently and enjoyed, albeit at a more sedate pace.

Inspired by a true story, The Franchise Affair is about social mobs before social media mobs were a thing. It starts when contented lawyer Robert Blair receives a phone call just before he’s about to head out for the day. Marion Sharpe, one of the two Sharpe women (considered strange by most of the town) asks for help during a questioning. As it turns out, a teenager named Betty Kane is accusing the Sharpe women of kidnapping and forcing her to be a slave. Something in Betty Kane arouses the suspicions of Robert and he dedicates himself to helping the Sharpes and proving Betty a liar.

Honestly, this was gripping and startling modern given that it’s 75 years old. I liked the exploration of image – how Betty Kane is judged innocent because she looks and carries herself like a victim. In fact, she is the typical underdog – someone that we’d love to champion even today. Meanwhile, the Sharpes have been known to be strange and standoffish and most of the town has no compunction in realising their guilt. It’s not until you meet and get to know them that you realise how unlikely the charges are.

But still, the mob carries on because they don’t know the Sharpes. Windows are broken, insults like “fascist” are written on their wall, and the Sharpes are increasingly harassed. On their side is Robert and a few unlikely allies – his cousin Nevil, his lawyer friend Kevin, and the local mechanic. They are an unlikely collection of allies but it’s interesting to see how the Sharpes accept all of them as they are – there’s not much pretending when you’re around friends.

“The criminal is a person who makes the satisfaction of his own immediate personal wants the mainspring of his actions.”

Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair

Tey does a masterful job of calling out moral crusaders, those who instinctively leap towards the side of the underdog without pausing to see who the real crime has been committed against. It’s what made the book very modern to me; cancel culture can jump quickly to one or the other side and we still have the same tendencies of choosing someone to back based on how we view society.

Interestingly, neither side is completely free from this tendency – Robert and friends tend to ally behind the Sharpe women because of their life experiences, it just so happens that their experiences steered them right. But I did find it telling that both Robert and Marion had sympathy for Betty Kane’s adoptive mother (and family, in Robert’s case); it implies a sense of compassion that steers their judgement of people. In fact, the Kane family is treated with a surprising amount of compassion, apart from Betty, none of the family is portrayed negatively. It’s moral crusaders like the Bishop of Larborough and those who manipulate others for personal gain (Betty) that come in for the most criticism in the novel.

Lastly, I don’t know which edition of The Franchise Affair you’ll pick up (if you decide to pick it up at all), but mine had an introduction by Tana French that I would recommend you avoid until you finish reading the book. The introduction started with the real-life case that inspired the book and I thought it would be interesting background knowledge, but French quickly starts talking about spoilers as well as how you should feel after the book is read in such detail that I skipped to the start of the story. I wouldn’t recommend reading it first since it will prejudice the way you look at the book.

Overall, I found The Franchise Affair to be a gripping and startlingly relevant story. It’s not just about what happened to Betty Kane, it’s also about how people are judged and how victims are sometimes in the eye of the beholder.