10 Best Adventures of 1936 (10)
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May 14, 2016
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1936 adventure novels. Happy 80th anniversary!
Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant crime adventure A Shilling for Candles.
When the body of talented, popular movie star Christine Clay is found on an isolated stretch of beach on the southern coast of England, the police quickly determine that it wasn’t suicide but murder — and arrest a suspect to whom all circumstantial evidence points. The suspect flees, to the delight of the general public, while Inspector Grant — who likes the suspect, and who suspects that he may be innocent — continues to investigate, despite his superiors’ conviction that they’ve already found their man. Erica, daughter of the town’s chief constable’s daughter, turns out to be a much more fascinating character than the shallow celebrities whom Grant must interrogate; the story is told, at one point, from Erica’s point of view. Tey heaps scorn on the British public, whose neediness must have made Clay’s life miserable, and who make the investigation so difficult.
Fun fact: The second of Tey’s Inspector Grant novels is sometimes listed as the first, perhaps because she published the first — The Man in the Queue — using the pen name Gordon Daviot. A Shilling for Candles was adapted in 1937 by Alfred Hitchcock as the really fun movie Young and Innocent.
Let me know if I’ve missed any 1936 adventures that you particularly admire.