
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.