Tey, Josephine -- A Shilling for Candles

C

Not a great plot, but a likeable book.

Tey’s second book, seven years after The Man in the Queue, and much better.  Again, it’s a straightforward detective story, with Grant thinking of himself at one point as ‘just a hard-working, well-meaning, ordinarily intelligent Detective Inspector’—like French or Poole!  The murder is that of an actress, who never really comes across as a personality, because she’s dead before the story begins, and suspicion falls on a neurotic young man who is helped by a woman (the excellent tomboy Erica Burgoyne) to run away from the police (just like Queue), nearly causing Grant to have a nervous breakdown.  The solution is out of left field: ***a fashionable fortune teller foretells the murder and then commits it to boost her reputation***.  Only Gladys Mitchell could pull a plot like this off.  The murderess’s descent into full-blown insanity recalls Allingham’s Death of a Ghost.

·        Adapted (very loosely) for film by Hitchcock as Young and Innocent.

·        Part of line of late 1920s arty women: Allingham, Dane / Simpson.

·        Anti-Semitism: 51­–54—but two characters (one a Jew) help a Jewish political refugee to get into England.

Nick Fuller.