Nicola Upson

Nicola Upson made her fiction debut in 2008 with her novel An Expert in Murder, the first in what has become a bestselling series featuring a fictionalized version of 1930s crime writer Josephine Tey. ...

Born in Suffolk in 1970, Upson graduated from Downing College, Cambridge with a degree in English and worked in theatre and journalism before reading Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair set her on a new course. Full of admiration for a novelist whose work is by turns witty, elegant and subversive she began to research Tey with a view to writing her biography but soon discovered that her literary identity was very different from the persona her family witnessed.

Intrigued by Tey’s character and the gaps in what she could find out about her, Upson began to flesh out the idea of featuring her in a novel, and cast her as a detective in An Expert in Murder. The book opens with Tey travelling from Scotland to London in 1934 for the last performances of her play Richard of Bordeaux but departs from reality with the murder of a young woman Tey had befriended on the train. When a link between the play and the killing is established Tey takes on the role of detective, with her venture later dramatized for the BBC’s Woman’s Hour.

Upson has since written a further ten novels that use events in Tey’s life as their basis. Several have been awarded CWA Gold and Historical Daggers and Sorry for the Dead featured as a Waterstones Thriller of the Month in 2019. While each of her books is rich with period detail the author, who splits her time between Cambridge and Cornwall, carries out her research separately to her writing, working day-to-day on a computer without internet access but with music and a succession of tabby cats for company.