The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey
The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey
Originally published in 1947.
In The Franchise Affair, the digestive routine of a rural barrister (Robert Blair) is happily upset and the reputations of an elderly woman and her middle aged daughter are put into question when a fifteen year old girl named Betty Kane tells a story abduction and imprisonment. Blair sets out to prove that the story is bunk—even though the police are disinclined to prosecute—in order to rescue the ladies, the younger of whom he is quite taken with, from local infamy. The tabloids get hold of story and rile up public opinion against the accused—who are said to have plucked the innocent teen from the street, beaten her and forced her into service as their maid—making them and their house, the Franchise, the target of hoodlums and vandals. Betty Kane’s seemingly intimate knowledge of the interior of the women’s house is seen as damning, but Blair’s faith in his clients, along with his newfound sense of heroism, leads him to investigate further than the police will.
Tey’s book was inspired by the true 19th century case of Elizabeth Canning, a London girl who disappeared for a month and then reemerged claiming to have been abducted by thugs working for an elderly madam who tried to force her into prostitution. The stakes were slightly higher in the Canning case, as one of her alleged abductors was sentenced to be hung before a judge reopened the inquiry. A firestorm in the press ensued and Canning was convicted of perjury and exiled to Connecticut. The whereabouts of Canning during her missing month were never discovered nor did she reveal them in her later life. Tey’s explanation for the gap—that the girl, a precocious vixen, picked up a married man in a café and spent a dirty four weeks with him in a hotel until his wife showed up and boxed her about the face—is in line with the American noir sentiment of the time about seemingly innocent young girls—“Whoever was going to suffer in any situation she created, it wasn’t going to be Betty Kate.”—though in this case the girl’s actions don’t lead to anyone being pumped full of lead or eaten by sharks.
Tey does introduce a hint of feminism when Blair’s proposal to one of his clients is rebuffed and he is told that she’d prefer to live with her mother:
“But Marion,” Blair says, “It is a lonely life—”
“A ‘full’ life in my experience is usually full only of other people’s demands.”