A SHILLING FOR CANDLES

The second of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries (published in 1936) was not quite as enjoyable as the first, maybe because there was less emphasis on Grant’s character development. I did, however, adore the awesome sixteen-year-old Erica Burgoyne, who despite being a police constable’s daughter, shelters a murder suspect and motors around the countryside in her “disreputable little car,” Tinny (“She used to be Christina, but the inevitable happened”), trying to prove his innocence. Smart (indeed, a smartass), eccentric, and unflappable, Erica steals every scene in which she appears and made the few chapters written from her point of view my favorite part of the book. Witness:

It was half-past six of a hot, still morning as she backed Tinny out of the garage, and no one was awake in the bland white house that smiled at her as she went. Tinny made a noise at any time, but the noise she made in the before-breakfast silence of a summer morning was obscene. And for the first time Erica was guilty of disloyalty in her feeling for Tinny. Exasperated she had been often; yes, furious; but it had always been the fury of possession, the anger one feels for someone so loved as to be part of oneself. Never in her indignation, never in the moments of her friends’ laughter, had she ever been tempted to disown Tinny. Still less to give her up.

But now she thought quite calmly, I shall really have to get a new car.

Erica was growing up.

I want more Erica Burgoyne, damn it! Henceforth, I will daydream about discovering a lost manuscript featuring her and Alan Grant as a lovably mismatched investigative duo. Or heck, forget about Grant and let’s bring back Tey from beyond the grave to pen a YA spinoff series about Erica’s crimefighting adventures.