A Shilling For Candles – Josephine Tey, 1936 ★★

Murder, She Shrugged

There is a certain type of mystery reader for whom the mystery itself is secondary. The mystery services a formula, follows a pattern, and provides background contrast to whatever aspect of the book it is the reader cares about. It is not taken seriously.

I don’t understand these kind of mystery readers, but they evidently exist in fair-enough number to promote the legacies of writers who cater to this approach. Which leads me to Josephine Tey.

Tey’s place among Golden Age mystery writers (those active circa 1920-1950) is high indeed, almost as much so as her contemporary and fellow Brit Agatha Christie. Tey could write, make no mistake. Open up A Shilling For Candles at any random page. Soon you are swept away by witty descriptions and a keen sense of time and place:

Not only was “smart” society present in bulk, but there was a blue-blooded leaven of what Jammy usually called “duchesses-up-for-the-day”: of those long-shoed, long-nosed, long-pedigreed people who lived on their places and not on their wits.

Or this, in the middle of a chase scene in the country:

The night was soft, with a damp air, and smelled pleasantly of green things and flowers. Somewhere there was a lime tree. There was no sky, only a thick misty dark above. Bells chimed every now and then, with aloof sweetness.

Stopping to smell the roses once in a while is a good thing, even in mysteries. After a while, though, it becomes clear how secondary this mystery-writing business was for Josephine Tey. In A Shilling For Candles, there are times her prose cries out in annoyance at having to dish out clues and witness testimony.

Elizabeth MacKintosh guarded her privacy under two different pseudonyms: Josephine Tey and Gordon Daviot. She was a well-regarded (if less commercially successful) playwright as well as a novelist. Very little is known about her apart from her work. She died in 1952. Image from https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/josephine-tey-mystery-novelist. 

A Shilling For Candles is Tey’s second mystery featuring Inspector Alan Grant, her usual investigative protagonist. In this book, Grant arrives from Scotland Yard to solve the murder of a famous actress found strangled on a beach off the English Channel. After identifying several suspects, Grant bears down on one, a handsome drifter who stands to inherit a sizable bequest from the actress’s death.

Is he responsible? Young tomboy Erica Burgoyne thinks not and tells the suspect himself so, in Tey’s signature offhand style:

“You’re not capable of it.”

“Thank you,” he said gratefully.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

The Erica Burgoyne subplot dominates the 1937 movie version of A Shilling For Candles, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and known as either Young And Innocent or The Girl Was Young. Read this book after watching the movie, a charming if at times pokey Hitchcock thriller, and be prepared for something quite different.

How different?

In both book and movie, Christine Clay washes up dead and young Robert Tisdall is quickly suspected. In the movie, Erica teams up with Tisdall to help him escape the law and find evidence to exonerate him, leading to many fine Hitchcock set pieces and some beautiful crying scenes by Nova Pilbeam as Erica. In the book, Erica brings Tisdall some food and finds the evidence on her own, without tears. This section is wrapped up with a third of the book still to go.

A poster for the film adaptation of A Shilling For Candles looks nothing like a book jacket ever would. No romantic clinches there, thank you! Image from https://www.moviepostershop.com/young-and-innocent-movie-poster-1937.

Erica is such a singular character in the book she seems to merit a bigger role in it. An unreconstructed tomboy, she has none of the romantic interest in Tisdall she displays in the movie. Hitchcock invests movie Erica with all the svelte glamour he bestowed on beautiful blondes. In the book, Tey is more matter-of-fact:

She was loosening collar and tie and shirt band with the expert detachment of a cook paring pastry from a pie edge. Grant noticed that her sunburnt wrists were covered with small scars and scratches of varying age, and that they stuck too far out of her out-grown sleeves.

While Hitchcock makes his movie about Erica and Tisdale, Tey makes her novel principally about Grant, first developed in an earlier mystery, The Man In The Queue, and featured in several more to come.

In Tey’s best-known Grant mystery, The Daughter Of Time, a convalescing Grant spends the entire novel in bed alternately reading about and discussing Richard III. Our mystery there, it turns out, involves historical analysis. In A Shilling For Candles, Christine Clay’s murder becomes a means for spectating on British celebrity culture in the 1930s and spinning a tangled yarn about the victim’s upbringing that turns out irrelevant to the facts of her murder.

The revelation of the murderer is A Shilling For Candles’ weakest moment. One of the conventions of Golden Age mysteries was encouraging readers to try to guess who did it before the book ended. It was a convention employed very well by Christie; less so by some others. Tey avoids this by withholding key information from the reader until the last pages of the book, when Grant finally fills us in.

In his introduction to a Touchstone paperback edition of A Shilling For Candles, mystery writer Robert Barnard enthuses over Tey’s “impatience with the roles and conventions of the whodunit.” But Tey not only fails to play fair, she leaves dangling plot strands she spent most of her book teasing out, brushing them away at the end like bothersome gnats. The mystery’s clues are withheld from us, as are the murderer’s motives, until they come out in one violent rush at the end.

Why did Tey write mysteries in the first place? I suspect the form of the mystery had something to do with it. Unlike most fiction, characters in mysteries aren’t required to grow or change as a result of their experiences. They are puzzles to unlock for clues toward solving a crime, discarded once their utility is at an end.

Tey uses this to her advantage from the very beginning, when her narrative lights upon a middle-class military retiree named Potticary who comes upon Christine’s body. In just a couple of pages, we get a full read of his blinkered attitudes, his odd army-honed habits, his parochialism and social chariness. “He probably had a slave mentality, but had never read enough for it to worry him,” Tey writes.

The opening scene in A Shilling For Candles occurs when Christine Clay's body washes up on a beach near the town of Westover, in Kent. There is no such town, but there is a Westgate-on-Sea in Kent, which has both cliffs and a popular tourist attraction, West Bay Beach. Image from https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g2492487-d2162035-Reviews-West_Bay_Beach-Westgate_on_Sea_Isle_of_Thanet_Kent_England.html 

Tey then has another middle-class character named Bill take stock of the situation:

Bill clicked his tongue against his front teeth, and jerked his head back. A gesture which expressed with eloquence and economy the tiresomeness of circumstances, the unreasonableness of human beings who get themselves drowned, and his own satisfaction in expecting the worst of life and being right.

All this is both rather reductive and fairly funny. Tey’s attitude about her fellow man may have been withering, but it did feed enjoyable prose.

This opening sets a tone that resounds through the rest of the novel. I enjoyed reading it, finding myself pleasantly diverted again and again by Tey’s baroque word paintings and terse one-liners. If Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway had had a baby, it might have been her. At the same time, I kept wondering where the suspense was, the sense of a villain getting away or else the wrong man being persecuted. Even by the dated standards of conventional locked-room mysteries that Tey apparently despised, everything here is so casual and tame.

It was a better read than Daughter Of Time. Not a high bar to clear, but worth mentioning. Tey comes off as snooty and upper-class there as she does here, but even more static and smug. Here you get colorful characters who do interesting things, however unrelated to the crime at hand.

The most gripping part of the book is the subplot that connects to the title. It is a phrase from Christine’s will, and references a ne’er-do-well brother who cheated Christine out of much happiness in life. The brother turns up a suspect when he is discovered lurking near the scene of the crime, elusive but defiant.

“He’s angry,” Grant muses at one point. “We’re spoiling something for him.”

But what? It seems worthwhile delving into the character’s motivation, particularly given how base a villain he is revealed to be, yet Tey leaves us in the dark. Apparently he’s just a bad seed who harbors bad will for his sister even after her death, and that’s that.

What A Shilling For Candles has to offer readers today is neither a mystery nor a story nor a character study, but a time capsule. There is a lot of good writing and descriptive detail shining a light on how people of a certain class in Great Britain thought and spoke some 85 years ago. Elegant and diverting, it provides an enjoyable break from heavier reading fare, yet leaves only a hollow feeling in the place where better mysteries, even (especially?) those catering to the most elementary of whodunit tastes, satisfy.