The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

What if you were accused of a crime that you did not commit when the accuser had all the evidence against you, and you had nothing to prove your innocence? That is the premise of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. Though it is the third novel in the Inspector Grant series, he plays only a small part.

The “star” of this book is Robert Blair, a small-town lawyer who has spent his life in moderate tranquility, living with a maiden aunt, playing golf on his off hours, and working mostly with people who want their wills written. As the novel opens, he is sitting down to his habitual afternoon tea: At 3:50 on every working day Miss Tuff bore into his office a lacquer tray covered with a fair white cloth and bearing a cup of tea in blue-patterned china, and, on a plate to match, two biscuits.

Suddenly the monotony rankles him. “Isn’t there more to life?” he wonders. Within moments he receives a desperate phone call from a woman he has never met pleading with him to help prove her innocence. His life changes abruptly as he is drawn into the troubles of Marion Sharpe and her elderly mother who have been accused of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl.

The rest of the novel shows Robert acting as amateur sleuth, following up every possible lead to discover the truth. With all the evidence against them, the reader sometimes wonders if the Sharpe women are lying to him, which adds to the tension of the story. Though most of the townspeople turn against Marion and her mother, there is a rich cast of characters who risk their standing in the community to support them and they do their best to help Robert solve the case.

The characters are well drawn and the writing is lovely. There is a hint of romance, but it takes a back seat to the mystery. I liked this book when I read it a few years ago, but I loved it this time around because of the excellent audiobook narrated by Karen Cass.  

This was an especially timely read because it shows how trusting people can be of the media, never questioning if something in print might be true or not. Tey is not heavy-handed about this, but it is interwoven into the story in a way that kept me chuckling throughout.

A very unusual mystery!

Blessings

The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski

My greatest challenge in reviewing this 500-page book (600 if you count the endnotes) is knowing what quotations to leave out since the whole thing was so wonderfully written.

Philip and Carol Zaleski have given us a great gift with their painstaking research on each of the major inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) and how their lives and writings intertwined. The name “Inklings”, according to Tolkien, was little more than a “pleasantly ingenious pun suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas, plus those who dabble in ink.” But History would record that, however modest their pretensions, their inkblots were no mere dabblings.

The group came together at a strategic time. WWI had left many in despair, but in others it had instilled a longing to reclaim the goodness, beauty, and cultural continuity that had been so violently disrupted. The Inklings came together because they shared that longing; they believed, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one, which was a belief that set them at odds with many of their contemporaries. Lewis described the Inklings to Williams as “a group of Christians who like to write.” The Zaleskis add that they shared more common characteristics than that including intellectual vivacity, love of myth, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.

The book highlights the idiosyncrasies of each member of the group beginning with Tolkien’s rapid, slurring, unintelligible lectures, which students endured because, as one student remarked, “Tolkien could turn a lecture into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guest. Speaking in Anglo-Saxon turned Tolkien’s leaden tongue to gold.” I was particularly interested in the details of Charles Williams' life because of C.S. Lewis' glowing accounts of him in his letters. The Zaleski's paint quite a different picture of him as a very strange man!

They also describe the periodic friction between the members, particularly Tolkien’s impatience with Williams because he disliked William’s fiction, but also because he distrusted Williams’ fascination with the occult. Lewis and Barfield disagreed often (and strongly) on the principles of anthroposophy. At times Tolkien and Lewis clashed in their literary views, but their friendship endured through the decades. When Lewis died, Tolkien wrote, “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age – like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one, but this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.”

Of course, in 500 pages, you are bound to find lots more information (trivia?) than in other books. It was fun to read that some of the early reviews of The Lord of the Rings called it “juvenile trash” and “an overgrown fairy story” (!)

According to the Zaleskis, By the time the last inkling passed away on the eve of the 21^st century, the group had altered, in large or small measure, the course of imaginative literature, Christian theology and philosophy, comparative mythology, and the scholarly study of the Beowulf author, of Dante, Spenser, Milton, courtly love, fairy tale, and epic; and drawing as much from their scholarship as from their experiences of a catastrophic century, they had fashioned a new narrative of hope amid the ruins of war, industrialization, cultural disintegration, skepticism, and anomie.

For three months this was my bed-time book, and it brought me many hours of pleasure.

Blessings,