Interview with Nicola Upson

Two interesting trends in the current historical fiction market involve developing new novels in the style (and sometimes using the characters) of famous mystery novelists of the 1930s and 1940s and turning those same novelists into amateur detectives. Nicola Upson’s series featuring the novelist and playwright Josephine Tey as both a crime writer and a solver of murders has reached its twelfth installment, and although I haven’t yet made my way through all the books, I found the three I did read quite fascinating. I also plan to check into her new series, mentioned at the end of this written interview, featuring the couple who invented the board game Clue. It’s out in time for Christmas, and it looks like a fun story to lighten up the dark days surrounding the Winter Solstice.

What made you decide to write a mystery series featuring the real-life detective novelist Josephine Tey?

I loved and admired her work. When I first read The Franchise Affair, I was struck by how original it was—not just the plot and the characters but the voice that comes so strongly off the page: witty, opinionated, and a pleasure to spend time with. Tey is very good company, and I wanted to get to know her better. I soon found out that she was a well-known playwright, too, and I thought it was a shame that someone who had achieved so much in two very different literary spheres hadn’t had the same biographical attention as her contemporaries. So I set out to write that biography and was lucky enough to speak to several people who knew her personally and professionally, like Sir John Gielgud. But she had rolled the carpet of her life up quite efficiently, and there wasn’t enough information to write a comprehensive, objective biography. That’s when my partner came out with the immortal words “for God’s sake, just make it up!” And that seemed such a rich idea, to follow her life and celebrate her work in a series of fictional murder mysteries, the genre for which we still love her.

Does the fact that Tey was a real person affect how you approach her as a fictional character? For example, is there any evidence that supports her romance with Marta?

When I decided to write the first book, An Expert in Murder, I laid down a ground rule for myself that I would always be on Josephine’s side and fight her corner (and the marvellous thing about fiction over biography is that you don’t have to be impartial); that I would try to recreate a woman whom the people who love her work would recognise, but who would also be interesting and credible to those who have never heard of Josephine Tey. The novel always comes first, though—it has to: writing down the facts of someone’s life doesn’t always make for a good story, but telling a story (I hope) sensitively and imaginatively will always bring a character to life, whether real or fictional.

Marta is a fictional character, and their love is a fictional love, so it’s not really a question of evidence. The relationship began in Two for Sorrow, which is a very dark book, and I wanted to counteract that with another sort of physicality, with a real love and tenderness; crime novels are often happy to depict violence graphically, and for once I wanted a scene where one human being reaches out to another and for that not to be about power or violence or hate. Having said that, Marta is a composite of several of the women to whom the real Tey was close during her lifetime—as was Tey’s character, Marta Hallard, who appears in several of her novels. One of my inspirations was the actress Marda Vanne, who wrote Tey a year-long love letter in the form of a diary. Finding that diary in an archive—page after page of thin blue paper, covered in tiny handwriting and partly in code—was such an exciting discovery. Some of Marda’s words from the diary are quoted in Two for Sorrow, and Marta has other influences, too—but she’s her own woman, and my own creation.

Josephine and Marta’s ongoing relationship is as important to me as any of the individual plotlines within the series: there’s a moment in the new book where they have breakfast in bed together in a friend’s house—that might seem a trivial detail, but it’s a huge moment for two gay women in 1941, not to have to hide their relationship and to be treated just like a straight couple, at least within a trusted circle. The way that readers have warmed to Josephine and Marta’s relationship and seem as concerned about their future as I am is really satisfying, and if these books can stand up for that compassion in a dangerous time for gay rights, that’s important to me.

Archie Penrose appears from the first book on. How would you describe him and his relationship with Josephine?

I’d describe Archie as the person I would want to investigate my murder or the murder of someone I loved: he’s intelligent, hard-working, fair, compassionate and sensitive without being sentimental—never entirely detached but detached enough to get the job done. He’s the human face of justice—not of the law but of justice.

He and Josephine are friends, unencumbered these days by any inclination for romance between them, and that’s an interesting thing to write about. They love each other, confide in each other, and occasionally fall out, but they have an unshakeable trust. Of all the scenes in a book, I find their moments together the easiest to write.

When the idea for the series arrived, my partner and I were staying on Cornwall’s Penrose Estate, so I named Josephine’s detective friend after the place where everything began. It’s beautiful: woodland surrounding a lake, separated from the sea by an unspoilt stretch of sand. Years later, it’s become our home, just as it’s Archie’s.

Although Tey is best known nowadays for her detective novels, especially The Man in the Queue and my personal favorite, The Daughter of Time, she actually had a much broader presence on the literary stage, reflected in the first novel of the series, An Expert in Murder. What would you like readers to know about that?

That she was immensely successful as a playwright, mainly because of her first West End play, Richard of Bordeaux, which ran for over a year at London’s New Theatre in the early 1930s and starred Sir John Gielgud. It was a huge hit: people went 30 or 40 times to see it, and I remember P.D. James telling me how upset she was as a young girl not to be able to travel to London and see the play that everyone was talking about. Tey’s plays—written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot—often had historical themes, and in a sense paved the way for her passionate defence of Richard III in The Daughter of Time. It’s sometimes said that Tey was prouder of her stage work than her crime novels, but I don’t think that’s true, especially in later life. I have a letter where she’s talking about The Daughter of Time, and she says how unlike anything she or anyone else has written it is, and to me she seems to take great satisfaction in how well received her novels were.

By this twelfth adventure, almost a decade has passed, and we are in the middle of the Battle of Britain. Could you sketch Josephine’s situation at the beginning of the book?

The Voices of the Dead opens very specifically on 10 May 1941, when Josephine is in London for Archie’s wedding—a rare journey south from Inverness, as the travel restrictions of wartime have kicked in. That night was the last and worst of the London Blitz, and I wanted to bring the horror and devastation of that period in our history to life. Two of my characters are based on the famous stage and costume designers, Margaret and Sophia Harris, who worked under the collective name “Motley” and designed Richard of Bordeaux; their studio in St. Martin’s Lane was completely destroyed in the bombing that night—Sir John Gielgud memorably described the ruins strewn with theatrical costumes and the firemen wearing the feathered hats from Hamlet as they sorted through the debris—and I’ve used their personal tragedy and Josephine’s experience of that to reflect the shock, grief, and courage that characterised those long, uncertain months in London.

From London, the story moves to Wales, specifically Portmeirion—where, it turns out, the National Gallery of Art is storing paintings nearby. Tell us a bit about that.

I decided when I reached the war years that my plots for those books would always revolve around life on the home front—that’s what Josephine would have experienced, and that’s what interests me most about the period; not the politics and the fighting but the ways in which ordinary people faced a situation which was not of their making and which they could do very little about. One of the main strands of the novel was inspired by something else that was happening in 1941, when a priceless collection of paintings from the National Gallery was hidden for safety in the slate mines near Blaenau Ffestiniog. It was an extraordinary operation, masterminded by a handful of brilliant, ingenious men from the National Gallery, and it saved those treasures for the nation.

On a beautiful summer’s day, I followed in the footsteps of those paintings, retracing their journey from Penrhyn Castle—where they were first housed—to Manod Mawr, and it was very evocative to get a sense of the scale of the undertaking. Some of the paintings were huge—Van Dyck’s Charles I on Horseback is thirteen and a half feet high—and they had to be driven in a specially made “elephant case” up a narrow, exposed road to the mine entrance in the mountain, lowering the foundations of a tiny railway bridge to get the lorry through—you can still see the marks on the wall where the road used to be. Special brick sheds were built in the mine, with very carefully monitored humidity and temperature, and the conditions proved so successful that some of the techniques were adopted when the paintings returned to the National Gallery. Sadly, the mine is unsafe now and I couldn’t go in, but the quarry workers took me to the entrance, where you can see the adjustments that had to be made, and it’s very easy to imagine those lorries trundling slowly in back in 1941. I loved immersing myself in that story and celebrating the men who made it possible.

Yet despite the relative quiet of Wales, there is a body. What should readers know about the finding of that body, in the most general terms?

When the paintings are being moved into the mine, a dangerous roof fall reveals a woman’s body that has been hidden in one of the caves there for forty years. As Archie struggles to identify her, Josephine looks into the history of this close-knit community and wonders if the mysterious disappearance of a local schoolteacher—and the four children who were the last to see her—might hold the key to this puzzling cold case.

What do you have planned for Josephine’s next adventure, or are you working on something else altogether?

I’ve been working on a new series featuring the real-life couple who invented the detective board game Clue back in the 1940s, and that’s been a lot of fun. The first book, The Christmas Clue—a snowy festive murder mystery set in an English country house during the war—has just been published in the US, and I’m excited to see what readers think of it.

But Josephine still has plenty of adventures to come: there will be one more book set during the war years, based on a real-life theatrical mystery that an actor friend shared with me, and then the series will move into Tey’s most creative and productive period, when she wrote those groundbreaking novels like The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar, and The Daughter of Time. Her life was incredibly rich and her books are still so loved and influential, and it’s a joy to spend time with her.

Nicola Upson is the author of two nonfiction works as well as her series of crime novels featuring Josephine Tey—one of the leading authors of Britain’s age of crime-writing. The Voices of the Dead is the latest addition to the series.