The Franchise Affair (1948) was the first novel by Josephine Tey that I ever read, back in the roseate days of probably 2005. Several years later, with classic era crime and mystery fiction more my bag, I read the rest of Tey’s criminous oeuvre, but nothing quite came close to the sweetness of that first taste. And so this return visit to the eponymous gloomy house where a 15 year-old girl claims to have been held captive by the two women who reside there was undertaken slightly nervously — memory can play tricks, after all. Well, everyone relax; we can add this to The White Priory Murders (1934) and Green for Danger (1944) on the list of recent rereads I enjoyed even more second time around, and holy hell if it doesn’t seem to me now one of the most perfect little books I’ve ever encountered.
Josephine Tey
#971: (Spooky) Little Fictions – Ghosts from the Library [ss] (2022) ed. Tony Medawar
With the annual Bodies from the Library collections, which have brought long out-of-print stories of crime and detection back to public awareness, proving rightly popular, editor Tony Medawar turns his attention to another facet of genre fiction with the Ghosts from the Library (2022) collection, in which authors (mostly) better known for their stories of crime and detection have a go at generating some supernatural chills instead.
Continue readingIn GAD We Trust – Episode 25: Fair Play and the Nomenclature of Golden Age Detective Fiction [w’ Scott K. Ratner]
Gutsy of me to suggest, on my site dedicated to the discussion of Golden Age detective fiction, that a lot of the terminology used to talk about these stories is incorrect, eh? Well, thankfully I’m not the one trying to convince you; that job falls to Mr. Scott K. Ratner.
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