Josephine Tey is a writer who, whilst on a train journey from her home in Inverness to London, meets a young girl who claims to be one of her biggest fans. Later, the young girl is murdered. Josephine’s friend, Archie, is the detective assigned to the case and he soon becomes worried that perhaps Josephine was the intended victim. This idea is not such a leap when someone involved with the theatre production of Josephine’s play is also murdered. Called to the peaceful wooded churchyard of St-John's-at-Hampstead, Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose faces one of the most audacious and unusual murders of his career. The body of the church's organist is found in an opened grave, together with a photograph of a manor house and a cryptic note. The image leads Archie to Cambridge, where the crisp autumn air has brought with it bustling life to the ancient university and town. Josephine and Marta find themselves in mortal danger. Marta has made a ghastly discovery as the investigation closes in on the murderer.

I have now read up on Tey who is an interesting character but as a book character, I’m not sure. It’s also perfectly obvious that one of the supporting characters was John Geilguld and, again, this makes me a little uncomfortable. It almost feels like I just read unapproved real life fanfic. On the one hand we've got a totally cool concept. The really very talented Nicola Upson has taken the very real Josephine Tey, a mystery author and playwright, and turned her into the very kind of detective she once wrote about. With this particular book she's gotten even more meta by setting it in the midst of the run of "Richard of Bordeaux" the super successful very play Tey really did write in the 1930's. Tey meets a young fan of the play, which is about to close and go on tour, on the train, strikes up an immediate friendship and then the girl is promptly murdered in a weird, dramatic way. Penrose has discovered a link between Elspeth and Bernard, but what he has yet to find out is the identity of the murderer. Vital information comes from a very unexpected source. Mi-au placut atat descrierile strazilor din Londra, a garilor si atmosfera din luxosul West End, cat si faptul ca ne-a permis sa patrundem in culisele teatrului. De asemenea actorul principal al piesei, John Terry, m-a dus cu gandul la celebrul fundas de la Chelsea Londra si totodata fostul capitan al selectionatei Angliei.A lot of the Upson’s narrative was spent on the offstage drama and large personalities of many of the suspects, as well as their secrets, some of which were actually not germane to the motives for the crime.

However, what is a little rarer in cosies was the graphic and gruesome portrayal of the murders and the murder scenes (the placement of the dolls in particular made me wonder if this was a horror story for a moment). This seemed odd for the genre (which this book is obviously being marketed towards). If I’d been involved in the editing, I’d have advised that this, along with the amount of swearing, should have been reined in for a cosy's target audience. which seems to have been carefully planned. Here enters Detective Inspector Archie Penrose, an old acquaintance of Tey's, the best friend of her lover, whom Penrose saw die at the Somme. He suddenly had an image of his down-to-earth sergeant rushing home from the Yard every night to devour the latest thriller by his fireside. Better still, perhaps he was actually writing one of his own. The thought of Miss Dorothy L. Sayers turning out to be a portly, moustached officer of the law in his early fifties was priceless, and he made a mental note to mention it to Josephine when he saw her tomorrow night. It appears I may have found that most rare of things: a literary tribute (a.k.a. fan-fiction) that worked for me!Another huge issue I had with the book was the amount of chapters I had to wade through after the crime was solved. I have discovered I am more of a fan of finding out whodunnit and closing the book. Upson went into great detail of the murderer’s motivations and reasons for committing the crime, along with the affects this had on the other characters. It went on for several chapters and I think this should have been culled down considerably. Terry, though, shares with Gielgud the danger of being homosexual in an era in which male relationships brought disgrace and imprisonment. Part of Upson's purpose in adding her own 1930s mystery story to those written at the time is to be franker and less judgmental about gay and lesbian culture than contemporary authors were able to be. Mark Lawson wrote of the book that "the novel uses crime fiction's past to entertaining present ends. In a book teeming with literary pseudonyms and disguised identities, there are strong hints that Nicola Upson may make a name in crime fiction as the real thing". [4] Radio Adaptation [ edit ] Two characters in a lesbian relationship also constantly use the term lover for each other and again, it felt a clunky term for the time setting of the book. (Actually it feels a clunky term for 2019. Maybe it’s something said more in the US and just seemed jarring to me? I don’t know.)

Gregarious only within a small circle, however: Mairi MacDonald found Tey’s unwillingness to meet strangers “almost pathological in its intensity.” Having decided to model Brat Farrar’s physical appearance on that of a well-known racehorse dealer, she asked her friend Caroline Ramsden to find out all she could about him. “It isn’t a question of wanting to meet him—which I should actively dislike,” she wrote to Ramsden. “It is a quite detached curiosity about him…. What he thinks, reads (I suppose he can?), says, eats; whether he likes his bacon frizzly or flaccid…. It always happens with someone I see casually, like that; and once my curiosity is satisfied my interest finishes. But until the picture is complete the curiosity is devouring.” The novel is set in the London theatres of the 1930s. The book revolves around Josephine Tey, a version of the famous novelist. The story begins with Tey taking the train from ScotlandUpon arriving in London, the pair separate, as Elspeth has left her bag on the train. Soon after, the girl is found dead, apparently having been stabbed with a hat pin, a crime