An Expert in Murder (Josephine Tey)

Product Information

When there's a second murder in the West End he knows that there's a ruthless and sadistic killer in the theatre set. It begins in 1934 when Tey is traveling to London to celebrate the last week of her successful play Richard Bordeaux. Yet occasionally there are so many characters known by both first and last names I got slightly confused and would have to back track some pages.

I enjoyed the one Tey I’ve read hugely, so maybe I shouldn’t bypass these as I have been guilty of doing. Richard of Bordeaux" has been the surprise hit of the season, with pacifist themes that strike a chord in a world still haunted by war. I think combining fictional characters and real characters in an historical setting is very challenging. I wasn’t totally comfortable with using a real author as a fictional character, but maybe if it pushed a few people towards her books it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.The clues tie her play to the characters who are victims, the first a young girl Josephine meets on the train. The first murder occurs shortly after the train arrives, and odd but obvious clues lead to a connection with the play and with the author herself. Nor is she particularly friendly or kind, except of course when she inexplicably became best chums with the future murder victim after a short train ride. This link with the past was becoming harder to hold on to, though, as she found herself unexpectedly in the public eye. Tey wrote several mystery novels, two of my childhood favourites being THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR, about a young girl who accuses two spinster ladies of abducting her, and BRAT FARRAR, about an heir to a fortune who is a possible impostor.

Nicola is currently writing the sixth book in the 'Josephine Tey' series, and a standalone novel set in the 1920s. Josephine smiled to herself, imagining how pleased Terry would be to perpetuate the rumour of a romance with his glamorous leading lady, but she had to crush Elspeth’s hopes.I am sure there are some books that you have on your TBR piles which you mean to get round to reading for ages and ages yet for some reason, and despite the best intentions, the mood never quite takes you – even though you are fairly sure you are going to enjoy it. She should be meeting me at King’s Cross if this train arrives before she has to be at the theatre,’ Josephine explained, tucking in to her meal and encouraging Elspeth to do the same. 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.

Looking again at the memorable hat, Josephine guessed that Elspeth’s adoptive mother was not without her own sense of the dramatic. I think my problem was that it was too dark for my crime taste, I prefer cosy crimes (it´s my escapist genre).

But like most people of her generation, who had lived through war and loss, Josephine had acquired a sense of perspective, and the train’s mechanical failure foretold nothing more sinister to her than a tiresome wait in the station’s buffet. At the time of this novel Tey, whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, hadn't yet invented the Josephine Tey pseudonym; she was writing under the name Gordon Daviot. I understand that the more characters you have in a crime book the more suspects, motives and red herrings you can work in. Even now, more than twenty years later, she could never leave Scotland by train without remembering the summer of her seventeenth birthday, when she and her lover–in defiance of the terrible weather–had explored the Highlands by rail, taking a different route from Daviot Station every morning.