Josephine Tey is one of my favorite mystery authors--easily top five. This isn't a favorite book among her works though. Sadly, she only wrote eight. The introduction to the latest editions by Robert Barnard name The Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair and Brat Farrar as the standouts; I'd add Miss Pym Disposes to that list of her best. A Shilling for Candles is only her second book and her two earliest books are indeed imo her weakest, though I like A Shilling for Candles better than her first mystery featuring Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, The Man in the Queue. The strength of most Teys, including this one, isn't in a tidily plotted whodunnit with clues giving you a fair chance at the solution and a particularly clever twist. The introduction points particularly to A Shilling for Candles in that regard as an example, saying that Tey was not interested "in that kind of game."
So what are this novel's particular pleasures? Well, her prose for one. Lively, full of wry insights, humor, an apt way with descriptions. Her characters for another, and in this case I definitely thought this cast was more memorable than in her first Grant novel. There is an odious reporter, an eccentric astrologer, egotistical show business people and the delightful Erica Burgoyne, teen detective, who arguably proves better at the business than Inspector Grant. Grant isn't along Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or even Lord Peter Wimsey lines. He laments that himself at one point that he's "just a hard-working, well-meaning ordinarily intelligent detective." Barnard accuses Tey of anti-Semitism in his introduction, but doesn't cite examples, and I have to wonder if it's he just doesn't get that Grant isn't meant to be a Holmes or Poirot. I don't think we're to take his beliefs as that of the author. He's fallible. It may be that anti-Jewish lines are excised from the later or American editions, or that I have yet to find them in my reread of Tey with 3 more novels to go. Unless I missed it because it's encoded as "Eastern European" in this book. But I find it telling that in the first two books, every time Grant expresses a prejudice and makes assumptions based upon it, he's proven wrong--and the character of Eastern European origin in this book doesn't fit any negative stereotype. It could be I'm giving Tey too much credit for being subtle. Maybe. But I suspect Barnard doesn't give Tey enough credit.
I think what I found most poignant in this book though was the portrait of the murder victim we can only get to know through others--film actress Christine Clay. What emerges is a very sympathetic portrait, a vivid one both of her and the prices of celebrity.
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