An Expert in Murder (Josephine Tey)

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Had she been superstitious, Josephine Tey might have realised the odds were against her when she found that her train, the early-morning express from the Highlands, was running an hour and a half late. The writing is evocative, timely details as to matters of food, clothing, life in general are rife, putting the reader into the scene. After her father’s long illness, then his death, who could blame Elspeth for taking refuge in the less demanding emotions of the stage, or for contemplating another, more glamorous, identity? This first tale starts with “Josephine” travelling down from her home in Scotland to sort out some theatrical business concerning her successful play “Richard of Bordeaux”.

he would consider the most appropriate path to his own redemption") in the interests of tension rather than convincing psychology. It was broadcast between April 21, 2008 and May 2, 2008, barely a month after the novel's publication.

It spoke to the unbridgeable divide between those who’d experienced the trenches and the tunnels those who hadn’t. One of the passengers sharing Tey's compartment is traveling to London to visit relatives and to attend Tey's play with her new love interest. And the aforementioned Wilde and Poe were larger-than-life characters not remotely averse to putting themselves in the public eye; I imagine they would have no problem with featuring in another author’s fiction as long as they took centre stage!

When I tell her how pleased I am to have met you, she probably won’t even know what I’m talking about. Elspeth however is murdered and the more that the case is looked into the more it seems to be linked to Tey and her play. And then all the actors who played in the real West End run of Richard of Bordeaux have been replaced by fictional ones; would it not have been possible to have adjusted the plot such that Gielgud and the rest were peripheral figures while the actors engaged in yer actual skullduggery (yes, I can understand why you might want to invent these out of whole cloth) were extras or understudies or something? Archie Penrose, investigates and soon learns that the victim was adopted under irregular circumstances. Thousands like Elspeth there might have been, but the sharing of tragedy–even on such a scale–did not make the personal cost any easier to bear for each individual it touched.In this tribute novel by Nicola Upson, the mystery pits Josephine Tey and her “friend”, Scotland Yard Detective Archie Penrose, against a killer whose motive for murder is well-hidden, in part by family secrets, in part by the passing of years. I wasn’t totally comfortable with using a real author as a fictional character, but maybe if it pushed a few people towards her books it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.