Challenge Result: A Shilling for Candles

A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

pubilshed 1936

When I asked people to look at my file photos and suggest books, the first answer for the first picture was this book. I was delighted, so I’m going with it, and re-read the book specially. (I thought of posting this straightaway, but as it was using the top picture from the previous post it might have looked as though it was the same entry, and discouraged people from reading… It's now two months since I asked, so I think it's safe)

I did a post on A Shilling... ten years ago, dealing also with the film Alfred Hitchcock made of it (pointlessly called Young and Innocent), and the interesting story of the star Nova Pilbeam, who died not long afterwards.

I’m not sure which scene the anonymous commentator had in mind, but I’m going with this one. An actress has been murdered, and her dresser is telling the police about a difficult incident in her dressing-room:

He had sent in a note to her lady one night in New York, to her dressing-room. It was the first dressing-room she had ever had to herself; the first show she had been billed in. Let’s Go! it was. And she was a success. Bundle had dressed her as a chorus girl, along with nine others, but when her lady had gone up in the world she had taken Bundle with her. That’s the sort her lady was: never forgot a friend. She had been talking and laughing till the note was brought in. But when she read that she was just like someone who was about to take a spoonful of ice-cream and noticed a beetle in it. When he came in she had said: ‘So you’ve turned up!’ He said he’d come to warn her that she was bound for perdition…

 

So not a direct description, but I like the idea, it seems right: in the middle of the play, changing costume.

This is the second of Tey’s Inspector Grant books,

I was a teenager when I first read it – I read everything I could find by Tey, including the unusual and non-series Kif, and very much wished she’d written more.

The Daughter of Time (two posts and other mentions on blog) was very helpful in teaching young people some history (I often think the key role of historical fiction) but I do not share the view that it is her best. I find it incomprehensible that the Crime Writers’ Association once voted it the Best Detective Story of all –nonsensical, a travesty. It’s also a very one-sided piece of work: I’m all in favour of looking at Richard III fairly, but throughout the book Tey uses exactly the kind of fudges and smudges with the facts that she is so shocked by in other historians. For example, she does not truly explain the situation of/ difference between a betrothal and a marriage.

The Franchise Affair is much-loved, but for me Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes are the best. But Shilling for Candles is an interesting entry, with a strange and memorable plot and an unexpected ending. I have read it many times and still have to find out each time why it has that title. (It is explained in the book, though not satisfactorily)

The book features Grant’s actress friend Marta Hallard, who will re-appear in later books with a slightly changed character.

He looked surprisedly along the well-dressed silent rows to the smart black-and-white figure in the middle distance. What connection had that familiar presence with the person his mind had drawn? There was the real Marta Hallard, her soignée, gracious, serene self.

…a fashion-plate in black and white.

The murder victim is filmstar Christine Clay She has gone for an early-morning swim:

….a woman. In a bright green bathing-dress.

She has died when the book begins:

The white line of the gently creaming surf was broken by a patch of verdigris green. A bit of cloth. Baize, or something. Funny it should stay so bright a colour after being in the water…

But we get a vivid impression of her throughout the investigation, how she came from a poor background to superstardom, and the people she met along the way. Tey’s interviews and succession of characters are always beguiling – to me she is the anti-Marsh. My friend Brad Friedman memorably described the middle of Ngaio Marsh’s novels as ‘dragging the marshes’ because of the boredom of her succession of dull chats. Tey is never as interminable as that – though sometimes when you think back you realize that a fair amount of it was only faintly connected with the crime. But better to be entertaining and occasionally off-piste… and Tey has a very high hit-rate when it comes to books that are as enjoyable now as they were when she wrote them, however many years ago.

Of course there will be more posts coming based on suggestions from readers, from the original challenge post and a subsequent one.  

The top picture  - the inciting item - is one of a series of ads for Maidenform bras. They would show a woman wearing her bra in unlikely situations, and the caption would be: 'I dreamed I wore my Maidenform bra at XXX'. In this case a fashion show. 

It seems a strange and actually off-putting campaign, I never understood it (even though this picture is lovely). Did it work? Had they researched how much women wanted to be in crowded places in their bras? Does anyone know any more about this long-running campaign?

Black and white outfit, Clover Vintage.