Book Review: A Shilling for Candles has some similarities to Josephine Tey's first Inspector Grant mystery, but this second installment is its own animal, with its own unique stripes. Once again this is not a whodunit: you may guess the perp, you'll never guess both the who and how. Inspector Grant again moves at his own deliberate pace, just a little more caffeinated this time, literally. He's no Sherlock Holmes, no genius. He just a dedicated detective steadily proceeding where the evidence takes him, right or wrong. One suspect calls him "just a routine policeman," and that's not far off the mark. Tey breaks up the routine by giving two other (amateur) detectives some of the story, one the Chief Constable's off-center, 17 year-old daughter, the other a scandal sheet reporter. But we always come back to Inspector Grant, persistent, determined, reliable, and quite pleasant -- someone you'd be glad to have a pint with. Which leads me to the next bit of enjoyment from A Shilling for Candles. Tey evokes 1930s England so well: the city and the country, the new technology, the still extant caste system, the reader is there in her time, as Josephine Tey wrote it (like your own personal time machine). There are a few of the attitudes of the time visible, but fewer than in the first book, and more representational than endorsed; in Tey's hands such bits seem harmless and merely what people actually said, without malice or harm intended. This isn't the greatest mystery ever, but it is well written, endlessly charming, and just a quick, pleasant read. For me, it was the characters, lovable, pitiable, evil, arrogant, stuffy. The characters make A Shilling for Candles a book to be read. I would've been happy to read this in one sitting if I'd just made time for it. Reading Josephine Tey is a dream. [4★]
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