Nicola Upson (Josephine Tey) Books in Order

This strand of Nicola Upson’s work is all about her fascination with Josephine Tey. Instead of inventing a brand‑new sleuth, she places a fictionalised version of Tey at the heart of a sequence of 1930s mysteries and lets her share the spotlight with Scotland Yard detective Archie Penrose.

The books are carefully researched but never feel like homework. Upson borrows real landmarks from Tey’s life — the runaway success of Richard of Bordeaux, the friendship with actress Marda Vanne, the plays and radio work, even the Suffolk cottage she would later leave to a goddaughter in fiction — and builds crime stories around them. You see rehearsals at the New Theatre, cliff‑edge performances at the Minack, BBC studios humming during the 1937 coronation broadcast, snowbound Christmas parties on St Michael’s Mount.

At the core is the relationship between Josephine and Archie. He is not simply a plot device but a man still marked by the First World War, navigating the politics of the Metropolitan Police and his own tangled loyalties. Josephine, for her part, is bright, guarded and quietly stubborn, someone balancing popular success with a very private nature. Upson takes seriously the idea that she may have loved women, and Josephine’s partnership with actress Marta Hallard gives the series emotional weight without turning it into a romance saga.

The mysteries themselves are varied in shape. Some are tight, almost theatrical closed‑circle puzzles, like An Expert in Murder and The Secrets of Winter, where a limited cast in a confined setting means everyone has something to hide. Others, such as Two for Sorrow, Fear in the Sunlight or Sorry for the Dead, braid together crimes from different decades so that what happened long ago keeps echoing forward into the present investigation.

Upson is especially good at using real cases or cultural touchstones as starting points: Edwardian baby‑farming trials, the Red Barn murder, the early days of Hitchcock and film noir, the mass evacuation of London’s children at the start of the war. She is less interested in gore than in aftermath, asking what it costs to carry guilt, keep a secret or live with a public story that doesn’t quite match the truth.

You don’t have to know Tey’s own novels to enjoy these books, but if you do, there’s an extra pleasure in spotting the way Upson threads them through her plots.

Read as a whole, the Nicola Upson / Josephine Tey sequence feels like a long conversation between two writers across time. Tey’s themes — justice, reputation, the slipperiness of “official” history — are all here, refracted through a more modern lens and enriched with detail about theatre, film and broadcasting between the wars. If you’ve just discovered Josephine Tey and want to stay in that world a little longer, this is exactly where to head next.