Customer Reviews

Expert in Murder, An: A Josephine Tey Mystery

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"In both crimes there was a terrifying lack of humanity, a mockery of the dead which chilled him (Penrose) even more than the loss of life itself."


There is an old-style elegance to this richly atmospheric mystery set in the world of the theatre during the early 1930's. Mystery writer and playwright Josephine Tey is the central character in this story of a shocking murder onboard a train. The investigation slowly reveals a tangled web of events harking back to the Great War, the complexity of which is only illuminated at the end, showing just about everyone remaining to be a victim in the tragedy.

Nicola Upson has written a beautiful and involving mystery which transcends the genre. By framing her novel around Josephine Tey, it allows her to paint a vivid picture of the period and the emotions still lingering after the Great War. You really feel like you are in Tey's era while reading this. While Tey could have become just a plot device in another author's hand, she becomes a real person, as do many of the other characters, including her romantic interest, Inspector Archie Penrose.

Tey's most successful play, which made Sir John Gieguld a star, is where danger lies. But it is on a train from Scotland to London where Josephine meets a special young woman full of life and simple charm. On her way to meet her boyfriend, Elspeth will meet evil and not live to know the reasons why. Upson paints a sweet and romantic picture of the times themselves, and Elspeth, giving her murder a poignancy which tells the reader right away that this mystery is going to be something special.

As Archie investigates and Josephine mingles, every character is fleshed out in a way we used to see during Tey's era of great mystery writers. Josephine takes a back seat during the middle portion of the book as we are treated to lovers and sickness and old wounds and bitterness, all creating an intricate mystery which has the reader wondering how any of this touched the far removed adopted girl who closed her eyes for the last time onboard a train to London. But then a second particularly vile murder much closer to Josephine's play takes place.

Archie and Josephine begin to untangle the ties which led to the murders from different angles in the last portion of the mystery. There is an exciting rush to reach the end for the reader, by now aching to discover the entire twisting series of events that began in a tunnel during the war and ended tragically on a train bound for London. There is a tenderness to the conclusion, showing the anguish and aftermath of the Great War and the many lives it took, some in ways unexpected and far reaching. Archie and Josephine's relationship does not go untouched by events either, giving the reader a thirst for more.

This is a fine, atmospheric mystery with much to offer those who enjoy a good novel which just happens to be a great mystery as well. Highly recommended!

Josephine Tey was a wonderful British mystery writer, now less often read. [See my review of the collection THREE BY TEY for a further appreciation.] It was a daring stroke of Nicola Upson's to write a new murder mystery with Tey at its center. But "Josephine Tey" is a pseudonym for Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896-1952); under another pseudonym, "Gordon Daviot," she wrote a play, RICHARD OF BORDEAUX, which rocketed John Gielgud to fame and broke West End box-office records. Upson's novel is set in the closing week of the run, in 1934, and Gielgud appears in it thinly disguised as "John Terry," together with several other theatrical personalities of the period.

The backstage passions of the theatrical world make a fine background to a murder mystery, just as they do in the mysteries of Tey's contemporary Ngaio Marsh (ENTER A MURDERER and others). But Upson exaggerates a good deal, and the picture will be less convincing to those who know the profession. More serious is the fact that with so many real characters in the story (no matter how disguised) the list of potential murderers is much reduced. Another problem is that Upson keeps shifting her viewpoint. The Tey character is more confidante than detective; the person actually in charge of the case is her sometime love interest, Inspector Archie Penrose. Not only does the narrative keep switching between these two characters, but it also includes chapters seen through the eyes of still others including, perhaps, the murderer.

One thing that Upson does extraordinarily well is to channel the narrative style of Tey herself, exactly catching the soft-core romanticism of novels of the period. But, unlike the real Tey (or Marsh, or Christie), who was more concerned with preserving a past vision of British life, she wrestles openly with the specters of the 1914-18 war. In this, she resembles a much more recent author, Jacqueline Winspear, whose MAISIE DOBBS series mines the same ground. Upson emerges well from the comparison, but her novel is not perfect. Four weeks after reading, I find I have totally forgotten who did it, and recall not caring much at the time either; yet I will certainly remember the book for its texture, theatrical setting, and period feel. [3.5 stars]

This review is of an Advanced Reader Copy, and originally appeared at www.duskbeforethedawn.net.

This murder mystery, the first in a new series, features London settings, the West End and the stage, an excellent historical period (England between WWI and WWII). What more could you ask for? Well, for one, a plot where you cannot guess "whodunit", which is the main reason I do not read very many mysteries. But Ms. Upson does herself proud: the plot is intricate and well thought out, the characters engaging and flawed, and the scenery described in detail but not boringly or intricately so.

Josephine Tey has authored the hottest play in London and takes the train from Scotland to see the plays closing and visit with friends. She meets a female fan on the plane but shortly after their arrival in London, that fan is murdered on the train (a murder on a train in a mystery?). The murderer dresses up the scene of the crime to indicate the act had something to do with Josephine's play, and a second murder the next day occurs directly connected to the play. Josephine's friend Inspector Archie Penrose leads the investigation, which begins to point to the actors and others associated with The New Theater in London.

Obviously to give away more would spoil the surprises, but the novel is populated with great characters:

* Lydia, the leading lady of the play, who has a new female lover named Marta and is being told she is aging toward the end of her starring roles;
* Aubrey, owner of The New Theater, wealthy, producer of the play, maker of careers, veteran of World War I as a tunneler, and carrying claustrophobia and a desire for vengeance from an occurence in the war; Ms. Upson's descriptions give excellent background here (from page 50 of the ARC):
"Today, as usual, he rejected the convenient option of a ten-minute journey to work courtest of the city's underground railway and set off on foot. The peculiar atmosphere evoked by London's tunnels was not for him, and he never failed to wonder at the willingness with which people now accepted darkness and confinement as a naturla part of their day-to-day existence. For Aubrey, the lingerings, acrid smell of those subterranean passageways brought back ghosts from a past he tried in vain to forget. Too old at forty-five to take part in the trench war but with a distinguished military record behind him, he had spent those terrible years as a tunneler in the guts of the French earth and had no wish to return to its horrors in his waking hours as well as in his nightmares."
* Fallowfield, Inspector Penrose' sergeant.

The historical setting and it's descriptions reminds me of Pat Barker's Regeneration series; though it is set in a slightly earlier timeframe, the depiction of those who experienced and/or were affected by WWI is key to that time period and this story.

Enjoyable, well-paced and I look forward to the next in the series.

Set in London's theater district in the early 1930's, this cleverly constructed detective novel features the real life mystery writer Josephine Tey as a character--not a sleuth. (Detective work is taken care of by the police.) The story revolves around a hit play--Richard of Bordeaux--actually written by Tey. It opens with Tey on her way to London by train for the last week's run of her hit. She becomes involved in a murder that has nothing and everything to do with the play. The detective on the case, Archie Penrose, is her boyfriend.

The plot is a jigsaw puzzle of lives carried on in the wake of "The Great War," and the many odd pieces all fit together quite nicely in the end. The characters--particularly the women--are well drawn, but perhaps there are a few too many. Occasionally credulity is strained with coincidence or with secrets known to one character but not others. The pleasant thing is that the author has avoided many clichés of the mystery novel and given us something fresh. The use of the war as background gives her story a dimension not often found in mysteries.

"An Expert in Murder" is a historical mystery set in 1934, and using the real-life detective novelist and playwright Josephine Tey (Elizabeth Mackintosh) as a "detective." The murder takes place, in fact, in the final week of the running of "Richard of Bordeaux" a play written by Tey which did run in the theater and between the dates used in the novel. There were no anachronisms. It is a legitimate "fair play" mystery in that sufficient clues are presented, if not to solve the mystery, at least to strongly suspect guilt.
All that said, I was more than a little disappointed in this one. One problem was that the author has replaced some but not all of the historical participants--new cast, new theater owner, but the same playwright and costume designers, for instance. So I was never quite sure who constituted a legitimate potential victim or murderer. (Mind you, this would not have been true had I been better read on the history of the play, and the author does suggest sources.) I was not engaged in the story, which is a very subjective thing. More seriously, I understood critical parts of the puzzle 100 pages out. When you read a real Josephine Tey mystery, you see everything in the next to last chapter, and kick yourself for missing the clues, which is a much more satisfactory state of affairs.
My advice is to read every mystery Josephine Tey ever wrote. Read John Gielgud's memoirs. He was part of the real "Richard of Bordeaux" cast. Then, if you like, give this one a try.

Nicola Upson has done excellent research on London in the 1930s and its theatrical world. Her heroine is Josephine Tey, who, under that name, had written detective stories and under the name of Gordon Daviot had written plays the most popular of which was "Richard of Bordeaux"; and this novel is set in the last week of its long London run. (I have since read the play and reviewed it on Amazon.) Josephine Tey appears as herself; the names of some of the other theatrical personalities of the time are thinly disguised - Upson's note at the end of the book gives more than a clue to who inspired these characters, and for those not familiar with the theatrical history of the time, a little research on the internet gives the real names of some others on whom her characters are loosely modelled. The preenings, tantrums and jealousies among actors - professional and sexual - are wittily displayed. The period flavour of the 1930s is also very well conveyed: the experience of the Great War still haunted several of the characters; the London of that time was in so many ways different from the London we know today; and Nicola Upson is poetic in the descriptions of atmosphere (though much more prosaic when she describes action). The back stories of several of the characters in the story are uncommonly well developed - in some rspects beyond the requirements of the detective story which this is.

For into this beautifully recreated world the author has introduced an invented murder story. Archie Penrose is the detective on the job. In a nice touch, Josephine is said to have known him for twenty years and to have modelled Alan Grant, her own favourite detective, on him. Archie quickly deduces that there must be a connection between the murder which happens in the opening chapter and the play and possibly with its author and with the theatre. In a wholly classic detective story there would have been enough clues planted in the novel to enable the reader in retrospect to see how the detective unmasked the villain in the end. This does not happen here: the somewhat ponderous ending depends on the lengthy revelations given by the murderer in what he thought was a moment of triumph rather than on the patient work of the detective. No great matter: this is an accomplished and cleverly structured story, as a cat's cradle of relationships and apparent motives for murder becomes ever more bewildering.

Choosing Josephine Tey to 'star' in a mystery series is a bold move. How can anyone match her? My expectations were unrealistic & Nicola Upson's novel is crowded with so many other characters that perhaps too many pages are necessitated? Detective novels often present history that is colored more by one's wishes than truth it seems to me.

'Setting the stage' is what a writer of plays does. For me, the neighborhoods & countryside of Britain can never be described too often, whereas my imagination filled in much of what was not spelled out about D.I. Archie Penrose, for example. Having read & reread Tey's stories for decades, I could infuse her character as a reluctantly successful playwright with depth & personality drawn from characters who peopled each of her books (particularly my favorites: "Daughter of Time," "Brat Farrar" and "The Franchise Affair").

Sometimes persons wanting to post opinions on amazon.com seem to gallop to cross the finish line & either skim the book or make careless errors. To mix fact with fiction can be 'tricky' but author Upson has probably filled notebooks with possibilities for future mysteries without expecting all to hit home with every reader?

Good luck to the author and cheers to all who bring homage to Tey, a great writer. If new, younger readers are set on the path of "discovering" Josephine Tey's books, extra thanks. Let Nicola Upson nudge all of us toward rereading the incomparable Tey!

i have been reading and RE-reading Josephine Tey's mysteries for the last 40 years. I was skeptical about her appearance as a fictional character in a new mystery, but it WORKS.

The story stands on its own, with no need to have read any of Miss Tey's own books. Quite delightful, with good plot twists and concealment of the criminal.

I look forward to more books by this author.

This is a very clever and unusual idea, using a real life writer (Josephine Tey) to help in solving a fictional crime set in the theatre world of the 1930's. It was full of believable characters with depth and richness and I was constantly changing my mind as to 'whodunnit'!

A very entertaining read which I would recommend for fans of Agatha Christie type novels.

An enjoyable murder mystery set in the London theatrical community of the 1930's that combines factual historical elements with the author's fictional creations, and uses the real life author/playwrite Josephine Tey as the catalyst in the tale......although the actual investigating is left in the capable hands of Scotland Yard Inspector Archie Penrose.

The multiple murder storylines utilize unusual methods for dispatching the murder victims, a cast of characters ranging from cold and callous to sympathetic and discerning and enough backstabbing, betrayals and red herrings to keep you guessing right up to the last chapter.

No subtle hints as to the culprit and definitely no spoilers here. You will just have to read the book if you want to know whodunnit. 3 1/2 stars