Book review: A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

The fifty-sixth book I read in 2015 was A Shilling for Candles, the second Inspector Alan Grant novel by Josephine Tey.  Famous film star Christine Clay is found drowned on the beach in what at first seems to be a tragic accident, but when the press spies Inspector Alan Grant at the inquest, it becomes clear that it must have been murder!

Tey has a genius for minor characters.  In The Man in the Queue, I was charmed by the artist known only as Struwwelpeter and was disappointed when he had no further role to play past the chapter in which he assisted Inspector Grant in breaking and entering; in this book, Robert Tisdall, similarly sympathetic, has a larger role to play, but the real delight is Erica Burgoyne, she of the hearty appetite and the dogged determination to procure chocolate with raisins.  I'd happily read a book just about her driving around the countryside in Tinny.