Murder, a crime writer and a West End play

The author Josephine Tey was one of the great writers of the Golden Age of crime writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Her books are brilliant with The Franchise Affair being outstanding in my opinion. Sadly we have only a handful of titles from her because she devoted a lot of her time to her career as a playwright and also because she died at a relatively young age. An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson uses Miss Tey as her main character in a “real life” murder mystery.

The book is set in in 1934 when Josephine Tey is travelling to London by train from her home in Inverness to watch the last run of her very successful play ‘Richard of Bordeaux’. On the train to London she meets an enthusiastic young fan named Elspeth, who is also on her way to the West End to see the play and who is very excited to meet her idol. Elspeth, however, never makes it to see the play as she is murdered in the train carriage they shared. When Scotland Yard is called in to investigate, Miss Tey meets up again with Detective Inspector Archie Penrose, who was a close friend of her fiancé who was killed during WW1 and who is himself in love with the author. The two of them gradually piece together information about Elspeth’s past to try and discover why she was murdered, but when another person is found murdered at the theatre where the play is being staged, Archie begins to suspect that the murders could somehow be connected to Josephine Tey and her play.

This is a likeable enough crime novel which doesn’t particularly stand out from the crowd of many others currently being published set at the same time and with a main character who is a career woman. The story and the motivation are a bit convoluted but it’s entertaining enough to follow the investigation. What totally escapes me is why the main character has to be Josephine Tey. The author could have created a similar character who was also a playwright and it would have made no difference at all to the plot – it doesn’t need to be Miss Tey to make the story work.

This is the first book in a series and it will be interesting to see what the author does with this love interest and how she uses the known facts of Miss Tey’s life in these works of crime fiction.