A Shilling For Candles
A review of A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey
Originally published in 1936, A Shilling for Candles is the second in Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant series. There is one enormous elephant in the room with this book which will affect its popularity amongst modern day readers, a very obvious antisemitic sentiment. I have always believed that books should not be bowdlerised to reflect modern day values and opinions. They are a testament to their times when, sadly and, ultimately, tragically such views were rife. If you are likely to be offended, stay away.
That said, it is a beautifully written book. Tey is a fine writer and has an attention to detail and an understanding of place and time which makes her books in a genre which can be a tad stereotypical a joy to read. She is at her best at the opening of the book where the body of an early morning female swimmer is found on the Kentish shore. She takes time to paint the scene and the reactions of those who find her, giving them character traits or odd ticks, which bring them to life rather than just being a means to an end.
The victim, it turns out, is a successful film star, Christine Clay, who had rented the out of the way cottage for a month to get away from the rate race. Very few knew of her whereabouts. She had recently taken on a lodger, Robert Tisdall, who is down to his last brass farthing, and has a very thin alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the murder, namely coming across her car, stealing it, having a crisis of conscience and returning it. Unsurprisingly, he is the number one suspect but, equally unsurprisingly, there are others, whose behaviour is less obvious who could have done it. These include her husband, a songwriter, her catty stage rivals, or perhaps Clay’s estranged brother.
The book’s unusual title is taken from Clay’s will in which she leaves her brother just a shilling for candles rather than the bulk of her money. The reference becomes clear as the book progresses as the ne’er-do-well brother has seen the evangelical light as the means to enrich himself, one of a number of significant red herrings in the plot which lead Grant to uncovering crimes but not necessarily the case in hand.
Grant leads the police investigation, fixated on a coat with a missing button, but he is not the only one who is interested in discovering precisely what happened to Christine Clay. Shadowing Grant and then taking up his own lines of enquiry is newshound, Jammy Hopkins, who is tolerated by Clay’s crowd and who tries to put himself into the psyche of the killer.
The other line of enquiry is pursued by Erica Burgoyne, a spirited young woman who is confident enough to drive around the countryside in a battered old car and consort with tramps and other picaresque characters. Tey clearly enjoys herself in constructing the character of Erica, a proto-feminist, and revels in the scrapes she ends up in. She just happens to be the Chief Constable’s daughter, and convinced that Tisdall is innocent, aids and abets in keeping him alive after he has given Grant the slip and finds Tindall’s coat upon which his fate hangs.
With so many lines of enquiry you would need a clairvoyant’s crystal ball to sort the wheat out from the chaff. Tey does not play fair with the reader and as she rushes the story to its conclusion, in contrast to the more languid approach she adopts earlier in the book, she plucks relevant clues as if from a magician’s hat to confound the reader. To my mind, the culprit’s motivation for the murder is not as strong as some of the other suspects and the haste with which Tey tidies up the case perhaps suggests that she recognises that too.
For me, this did not spoil the book unduly. Her characters were likeable, it was enjoyable, well written, and kept me engaged enough to want to see whodunit. Alfred Hitchcock saw some potential in it, using it as the base for his 1937 movie, Young and Innocent, which went by the alternative title in the US of The Girl Was Young. Perhaps he shared my sentiments as he changed the identity of the murderer.
