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Before beginning the meat of this review, I suppose I had best state my own bias. I loathe the practice of employing real life personalities as protagonists in fiction. Thus, I shuddered to find Josephine Tey to be the central character of this novel. The fact that the character bore the name "Tey," rather than the author’s real name of Elizabeth Mackintosh, made it somewhat less bothersome, but I can’t see why an entirely fictional protagonist could not have been created. Josephine is on a train bound for London from the Highlands. She is sitting next to a girl named Elspeth who, fortuitously (it appears at first) is a devotee of the playwright’s Richard of Bordeaux, a work about Richard II. Both women are to see the production and Elspeth waxes enthusiastic about the play. Josephine is enchanted by the girl’s youth and eagerness. When they leave the train in London, Elspeth has to go back aboard the train, whence she never emerges alive. She has been murdered and the scene staged with two dolls arranged as though they were actors opposite the corpse, which appears to be applauding a show. DI Archie Penrose (who bears a strong similarity to Tey’s Detective Inspector Grant) comes to King's Cross Station to begin his investigation into the case and is delighted to find Josephine in the company of his cousins who are to play host to her. Before too long, there is another murder. Bernard Aubrey, "one of the West End’s most prominent and influential theatrical managers," meets a particularly gruesome end and once more, there is an aspect of the theatrical in his surroundings. Could there be yet more deaths in store for the people associated with the theatre and, in particular, with Richard of Bordeaux? Upson manages to mix fictional characters with historical with a measure of success. Contrary to my expectation, she doesn’t have Josephine tracking down the murderer a la Miss Marple (and Agatha Christie’s work does receive a mention in the text.) Instead, she occupies the role of bystander for much of the time. The plot is very complicated, with unexpected connections between all the characters turning up at different times. Sometimes I felt I should draw a diagram so that I didn’t get lost when remembering who was who in relation to whom. The mystery is a very good one. I would hate to rate my performance at guessing whodunnit in detective stories but I certainly had not the slightest inkling in this instance. An interesting sidelight in the novel is that lesbian and male homosexual relationships are taken for granted, which suggests that the world of the arts and theatre were well in advance of official attitudes. There is no denying that this is a very promising debut and it will be interesting to see what Nicola Upson does with Josephine Tey in future.
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, April 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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