I love Josephine Tey’s mystery novels. I’m especially fond of Daughter of Time, her solution to the mystery of who killed the Princes in the Tower (not Richard III, according to Tey’s detective work). The novel, featuring Inspector Alan Grant practicing his detecting skills from a hospital bed, is a tour de force, a combination of murder mystery and historical fiction, with quite a bit of actual history thrown in.

I’m also a fan of The Franchise Affair, in which a young girl alleges that a middle-aged spinster and her elderly mother held her captive for weeks, while the mother and daughter deny ever having made the girl’s acquaintance. Who’s telling the truth? The reader is kept guessing until the very end of the book.

And Ms. Tey’s other mysteries are all good reads. So when I read over a year ago that author Nicola Upson had written a mystery with Josephine Tey as the main character and sleuth, I knew I would either like it very much or hate it. Not that I knew very much about the Josephine Tey outside of her books. It turns out that Tey’s real name was Elizzabeth Macintosh, and that she used yet another pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, for the plays she wrote. She worte and had produced several plays, the most successful of which was RIchard of Bordeaux, about Richard II, the play that made actor John Gielgud famous.

An Expert in Murder takes place during the final weeks of the run of Richard of Bordeaux in London. Tey is travelling to London to “see the play off” as it ends its run in London and prepares to go on tour through the country. On the train, Ms. Tey meets a young fan, Elspeth SImmons, and . . . well, the game’s afoot, and murder happens fairly quickly.

I vacillated while reading An Expert in Murder. The writing has aspirations to being literary, and it’s rather succesful in that attempt, remiding me of P.D. James. However the plot bogged down a bit in the middle, and I figured out a lot of the secrets before they were actually revealed. Then, the murderer and the reasons behind the murder were revealed, and there were still two more (long) chapters to go in the novel. What more could be said?

One of those two final chapters proved to be an unbelievably calm discussion of the history of the murderer’s accomplice as Tey rationally and unsuccessfully tried to talk said accomplice into surrending to the police instead of committing suicide. The final chapter of the book explored the relational vissicitudes of Tey and her gentleman friend, Inspector Archie Penrose. As far as I know the real Tey didn’t have a policeman boyfriend, but as a fictional device, it works just fine. The villain in the piece is Evil without redeeming character qualities, but maybe that’s to be desired in this sort of book rather than manipulating the reader into sympathizing with the murderer as some authors do.

On the whole I liked the book, and I’d like to try out the next book in the series, Angel With Two Faces, published last year. This second mystery featuring the fictional Tey and her friend Penrose is set not in London, but in Cornwall, and it starts off with a (horse)riding accident, very Tey-ish.