The Franchise Affair
New York: Macmillan, 1949. First Edition. First American edition, first printing, 8vo, pp. 238. Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone. Very good in a very good dust jacket with rubbing to the extremities and small chips to the jacket. Item #1378
Based loosely on the eighteenth-century case of Elizabeth Canning, a girl whose accusations of kidnapping against two women divided English society, The Franchise Affair transplants the story to postwar Britain and uses it to examine how quickly respectable people can be destroyed by accusation alone. Tey was among the most formally inventive of the golden age crime writers, and this novel is her most subversive; a detective story in which the mystery is not who committed the crime but whether a crime was committed at all. You should read this because Tey understood that the most unsettling question in any criminal investigation is not whodunit but whether the truth is recoverable once the public has decided what it wants to believe.
Price: $100.00