The Franchise Affair is a 1948 British mystery novel by Josephine Tey about the investigation of a mother and daughter accused of kidnapping a young woman visiting their area.

Robert Blair, a solicitor living in the country town of Milford, is called on to defend Marion Sharpe and her mother, who are accused of kidnapping and beating a fifteen-year-old war orphan named Betty Kane.

Later in the week, the tabloid Ack-Emma, described as "run on the principle that two thousand pounds for damages is a cheap price to pay for sales worth half a million", features a long story from Betty's side, based on an interview with her vengeful brother, Leslie.

Blair is assisted in his search for clues against Betty Kane by his cousin, Nevil Bennet, who also works at the law firm, and his friend Kevin Macdermott, a flamboyant London barrister.

She is described by a couple of people as demure and looking as though "butter wouldn't melt in her mouth"; one of them, a restaurant waiter, tells Blair that Betty came in for tea several times, looking wholesome: "And then one day she picked up the man at the next table.

The suspense of the Sharpes' guilt or innocence is maintained to the very end, with detailed investigative work proving that Betty had been abroad at the time with a married man only paying off in a satisfactory fashion at the trial.

Although given a contemporary (post-Second World War) setting, the story was inspired by the 18th-century case of Elizabeth Canning, a maidservant who claimed she had been kidnapped and held prisoner for a month.

The author Sarah Waters is offended by its outmoded, class-based values and contrasts the mid-18th century narrative on which it is based, the mysterious Canning case, with the immediately post-war implosion of the upper middle class in Tey's story and its total lack of compassionate understanding of the war-orphaned Betty Kane's behavioural experimentation.

[11] And in C. Beyer's feminist reading, the story demonstrates the period's blatantly unfair defence of authoritarian male prejudice in which the final shaming of an adolescent girl's sexuality during the court proceedings has more to do with privileged and outmoded attitudes than any concept of justice.