Nicola Upson – Josephine Tey Mysteries

Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey mystery series began as research for a biography about a writer who captivated her imagination. . .  and grew into a highly acclaimed long running mystery series centered on the life on one of literature’s “lone wolves.” Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Nicola talks about why Tey is in a class of her own, how the 20s and 30s are still relevant for 21st century women, and her Cambridge radio show. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: How Nicola became fascinated with Josephine Tey Why imagination is truer than “facts” Dividing life between Cambridge and Cornwall Why the Between the Wars period was crucial for women How a famous painter inspired her latest book Why she loves a Virago Classics Where to find Nicola Upson:  Facebook: @NicolaUpsonAuthor  Twitter: @nicolaupsonbook Podcast: The Eclectic Light Show What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.  Jenny:  Hello there, Nicola, and welcome to the show.  It’s great to have you with us. Nicola:  It’s great to be here, Jenny.  I can’t believe we’re actually so far apart, so this is lovely. Nicola Upson mystery author Jenny:  I know.  Technology’s a wondrous thing.  It’s predictable I know, but I like to begin with that “Once Upon A Time” question.  Was there an epiphany moment where you thought, I’ve just got to write fiction or my life won’t be what it’s meant to be?  And if so, what was the catalyst for it? Nicola:  Well, I feel a bit fraudulent about it, Jenny, because there wasn’t that sort of moment.  I owe it to Josephine Tey who obviously we are going to come to talk about.  The series really began about 25 years ago when I read her book The Franchise Affair and I thought it was just an extraordinary novel, so different from any of the ones written by her contemporaries and I wanted to find out more about her, because as much as we analyse Tey she has a wonderful characterization, a brilliantly rich sense of place, but there was just that voice.  It’s less hard to quantify than those reasons.  And I found out that she, in her lifetime, was known just as well, if not better, as a playwright.  She had several hits on the West End stage, one in particular called Richard of Bordeaux, and I thought it was very strange that somebody who had achieved as much as she had done in those two very different spheres hadn’t had a full-length biography written about her.  So that’s what I set out to do.  I’d only written non-fiction up to that point, I’d done some arts journalism and an art book and a theater book and it was the Tey biography that I wanted to do.  But as you probably know she was a very private woman, she rolled the carpet of her personal life up quite closely and cleverly behind her and eventually the gaps became as intriguing as the facts.  Josephine Tey – author of brilliance It was actually my partner Mandy who said to me one evening – we were staying in a National Trust holiday cottage on a beautiful Cornish estate and, yes, we had had a glass of wine or two – and she said to me “Oh for God’s sake, just make it up” and that really is how the series started – to tell a truthful picture of Tey’s life through a series of fictional murder mysteries in the genre that we know and love her best for these days.  So purely by accident to answer your question, and if it weren’t for Josephine Tey I don’t know that I’d have written fiction at all, let alone as quickly as I did. Jenny:  It’s interesting that it seems you really came to truth through imagination rather than fact. Nicola:  Yes, I think that’s true.  And for somebody who was as complex and in some ways contrary and contradictory as Josephine Tey was – as you probably know Josephine Tey wasn’t her real name, her real name was Elizabeth Macintosh, but she also had another pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, that she wrote plays and historical fiction under, and she often referred to herself as a chameleon, it’s a word that appears quite often in her letters with typical self-awareness, I have to say – and so for a figure like that who shapes and shifts and reading her letters, I’ve done lots of research and read a lot of Tey’s letters and a lot of the letters that were written to her and about her, and she does indeed have different personalities depending on who she was with.  Josephine Tey – Decades after her death, mystery remains – Photo Vanity Fair I think we all do that to some extent, we’re all different people to our friends and to our family and to strangers and professionally at work, but she did it to extremes, and she was also very good at being a bit of an outsider with those wonderful observations that people who love and know her novels will recognize.  And so that made her a good fictional figure and a good detective I suppose.     Nicola Upson: Tey mystery # 7 Jenny:  So you’ve got this fascinating series now where Josephine appears as herself and quite a lot of the events in the different books relate directly to her life and did truthfully occur, and then of course some of it is completely the product of your imagination.  You’ve now done seven published books and the eighth is coming out in a couple of months and you’ve mentioned that the first book, The Franchise Affair was one that broke all the rules.  Can you perhaps just explain for us a little what those rules were and how she broke them? Nicola:  Certainly.  Well, for a start The Franchise Affair – not all of her books are like this but some of them are – doesn’t even have a murder at its heart, which most Golden Age, most crime novels in fact do, and having written these books I know how hard it is to keep up the suspense and the interest of the reader without falling back on those conventions of the body.  But she didn’t.  She, in 1948, published a book that was ostensibly about a young woman who had allegedly been kidnapped and abused by two older women.  In 1948 that’s quite strong, dark stuff and I think that’s one of the things I love about Tey is that she stays so relevant and she has such a modern voice.  Her hero, Robert Blair, was a country solicitor.  You know, he wasn’t a superhuman amateur sleuth, he wasn’t a ploddy policeman, he was just an ordinary man who was taken over by circumstances and I think what’s interesting about that book in particular is that on the one hand, reading it now in modern times, it feels like a nostalgic snapshot of an England that’s gone for ever.  You pick it up and you feel the sun on your face, there’s that warmth to it.  But look below the surface and it’s a very dark book.  It’s a book about people being persecuted by the community that they’re supposedly a part of.  It’s a book about mob violence, it’s a book about prejudice and anger and it’s interesting, having read it quite recently in a post Brexit world here in Britain – again it has that kind of modern relevance and it reinvents itself like its author did.  So I suppose that’s what I mean really, the Golden Age rule book, the closed list of suspects, all those wonderful things that are expertly done by a lot of Tey’s contemporaries, she didn’t feel the need to do that and in fact maybe if she hadn’t had a series inspector in Alan Grant who – again that’s another thing she does originally in The Franchise Affair – he turns up on the wrong side of justice, I mean, that’s quite a brave thing to do.  Nicola Upson: Tey mystery #6 But if those books hadn’t featured a series detective maybe we wouldn’t necessarily think of them first and foremost as crime novels.  We’d think of them as psychological novels and I think she did bridge the Golden Age and the contemporary in a way that paved the way for people like Patricia Highsmith and P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. Jenny:  It’s interesting as I hear you talk.  It goes through my mind that perhaps she is also a mentor for you in your writing because your crime novels aren’t exactly the standard crime novel.  You don’t have the country house and everybody sitting around trying to solve the murder, but you do have a social group and social gatherings that kind of mirror that, but in a much more challenging way.  Have you taken her as a mentor as well?    Nicola:  I think she’s certainly a mentor for any crime writer really.  Val McDermid has often referred to her as “the crime writer’s crime writer” and I think that’s very true because she doesn’t teach us to be particularly brilliant mystery writers.  I would – maybe this is controversial – say that her plots are not the best thing about her writing at all, but she teaches us to be brave I think, and the one thing that perhaps I would like to emulate her more than any other is that each book that I write I hope is different from all the others, rather than sticking to one path, because she is a very unpredictable writer. Although she did have series characters who reappeared, every book that she wrote is different in some way.  They have different feels to them, different atmospheres and I hope that in that way my books might emulate hers.  Also I think she’s a mentor as a woman and as a person because I could hug her for living through the years that she lived through because those inter-war years, particularly for independent women like Tey, are fascinating to write about and through her and coming to these books with a strand of truth and history and social context to them has introduced me to so many people that I wouldn’t otherwise have known about.  Nicola Upson: Tey mystery #5 For example, it was irresistible because Tey had a film made by Alfred Hitchcock.  It was inevitably cast in the runes that I would write a book Fear in the Sunlight that had a fictional meeting between Tey and Hitchcock, but if it wasn’t for that I would never really have known about Alma Reville his wife.  She entered the film industry before he did.  She was so influential in his work, and when we talk about a Hitchcock movie, actually we’re talking about a real partnership, and I think one of the finest things about Hitchcock is the way that he collaborated with and credited his wife.  So it’s women like that: Rowena Cade who started the Minack Theatre in Cornwall where I set a book, Mary Size who was the Deputy Governor of Holloway Jail and did so much for conditions in women’s prisons.  All these people Tey has opened the door to for me and I’m very grateful to her for that. Women munitions workers stacking shell casings during World War I –  Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images Jenny:  You mentioned the position of women in those inter-war years and I’m just wondering – was it partly that after they’d seen some emancipation during the First World War, through very poor circumstances, being forced into jobs because the men weren’t available, and then there was this strong drive to try and push them back into their place after the war ended, and also the lack of men to marry as well.  It changed social expectations a lot.  Are those two of the factors that you’d be referring to? Nicola:  Yes, definitely, it’s absolutely spot on.  I think it’s hard for us to even conceive how seismic a change the First World War must have been for people and for some women it was a time of great grief and great loss because as you so rightly say they lost husbands and lovers and brothers and sons and the world was never the same again.  For some women, and I would strongly believe that Josephine Tey was one of these, it was a moment of liberation because not only were the professional expectations moved on so greatly – they did jobs that they would never have thought of doing.  In fact the book I’ve got coming out is very much a book about that.  But also socially, romantically, emotionally their expectations were different.  Tey no longer had to face that path of marriage and children as automatically being inevitable for her, which is a path that I don’t think would have sat very happily with her.  So it was a very double-edged sword: a great sadness but great opportunities and great freedom as well.  I think when I came to these books and set the first one in 1934 I underestimated how much the shadows of that war would still be hanging over all the characters I was writing about, whether or not they’d experienced the war directly.  And those wars so did meet in the middle, you know the shadow of one and the looming prospect of another. Sir John Gielgud: Tey propelled him to superstardom. Jenny:  You have referred to her career as a playwright and there is another very interesting little intersection there and that is that she helped launch Sir John Gielgud into superstardom.  I gather that he was a major respected classical actor but her play Richard of Bordeaux catapulted him into a much more popular stardom and you’ve talked with him a little about his association with her, haven’t you? Nicola:  Yes, I have.  I think that again the war is partly responsible for the huge success of that Richard of Bordeaux play.  It was a modern reworking of Richard II and she says herself in a letter to a friend that she thought she’d written a tale of bloody revenge and actually she’d written a play about pacifism.  I think it just completely hit the moment and Gielgud was a huge part in that.  He was a Shakespearean classical actor.  He directed Richard of Bordeaux as well as starred in it.  I worked in theatre myself and I know you don’t get moments like that in theatre.  People went 30, 40, 50 times to see it.  Lots of the cast were so wealthy after it that they bought country cottages, Gielgud included, on the Suffolk/Essex borders.  And I remember P.D. James telling me how as a young girl she was so cross because she couldn’t afford the train ticket to go to London and see the play that everybody was talking about.  So it really was a unique moment of theatrical history and I think because it   …. so well and it had that wonderful, elegant design by Motley, the trio of stage and costume designers and everything about it was just spot on.  But I think for that reason, because it was of its moment, her plays haven’t lasted and dated as well as her fiction has.  But that’s not to decry how popular and successful they were at the time. Jenny:  So am I right in assuming that she was a relative unknown?  She deliberately wrote a play which she imagined from the beginning Sir John would star in and then she pitched it to him?  That seems to me to take quite a lot of audacity.  Is that the right way to frame it?  Was that how it happened? Nicola:  Yes, it was.  That’s what he’s told me, that’s what he’s written in his accounts of how that play came about.  I think you’re spot on.  It was a huge amount of audacity and nerve and confidence in the work.  He also talked a lot about how when she first sent it to him it wasn’t really in a form that was performable as it was and he suggested amendments or cuts or changes and he didn’t really expect to hear back.  But she did.  She made those changes absolutely beautifully and of course the rest is history.  And it’s interesting I think – one of the things that shows how quickly she came on after that is she didn’t really have a huge impact in the rehearsals and staging of the play – that was very much Gielgud’s thing – but by the time you get to another play of hers called The Laughing Woman which also was on at the West End, and it wasn’t anywhere near the success but it was loosely based on the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska and there’s some brilliant letters in the collection at the British Library where she is writing to Gielgud telling him really effectively she doesn’t think he’ll be quite right for that part, almost challenging him to be good enough for that part.  The first Tey mystery up in lights That shows how much she came on and I think really that fierce arrogance about her work, that confidence about her work, is one of the things I love about her, because she was damn right, it’s good work.  There are touching things about it, like she talks about seeing The Franchise Affair in The Times Book Club window and it giving her the same feeling of joy and elation as seeing Richard of Bordeaux go up in lights at the New Theatre.  So there’s those bits that we all feel as writers, you know that excitement when we can have enough detachment to see our work being appreciated.  But there was always this fierce belief in her stuff.  I’ve got a letter of hers where she writes to somebody just before The Daughter of Time came out and says that she really does think it’s something genuinely new within the genre, which of course it was.   We’ve had lots of those detectives hold up in bed solving crimes from their bedside since then but she was the first to do it with Alan Grant, so yeah, nerve, pluck, confidence in her own ability – I think they’re all things that we associate with her. The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey Jenny:  And where did that come from, because there’s not a lot in her background is there?  I must admit that when I started reading you I hadn’t read any Tey but when I started reading you I did refer to a couple of the Tey biographies and there isn’t a lot in her family background that would indicate that she would have that sort of – it must have been totally inborn don’t you think? Nicola:  I think her mother was a huge influence on her.  Her mother was a teacher as well and I think they were very, very close.  I think her mother’s early death was a great tragedy in her life.  I think she came from a different social background to Tey’s father and certainly she would have appreciated very greatly what her daughter went on to do.  I think Tey would say that she was perhaps an inspiration in that sense.  But I think the very fact that she grew up in Inverness – her father actually was a fruiterer but he worked his way up too, he had a huge amount of determination and hard work and grit and he was determined that his daughters were going to get a decent education, decent opportunities, so he was ambitious too.  I think that although it’s not necessarily directly traceable, as you say, there’s a lot in her background that contributed to that confidence and that determination, if only to be bloody-minded in Inverness and to have that success in a small town community where it perhaps wasn’t expected of the fruiterer’s daughter to go on and have friends like John Gielgud and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Marda Vanne and Martita Hunt. Jenny:  Number 8 in the series, Sorry for the Dead, is due out later this year, April, I think.  Tell us something about the story behind that one.  There’s not a lot on line about that book at all at the moment. Nicola:  That’s partly because it’s been put back now until the autumn, it’ll come out in October/November.  It was inspired greatly by The Franchise Affair and my love of that book.  It is set in Sussex, which is a part of the world that Tey absolutely loved and it’s partly set at Charleston, the home which went on to be famous as part of the Bloomsbury Set where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant lived for many years, but it’s at Charleston before it became famous as we know it.  Famous Charleston house – setting for Tey mystery #8 You see Tey at three points in her life.  You see her in the 1930s as people who read my books will know and love her.  It also goes back to 1915 so we see Tey as a young girl during the First World War and some of the things that went on to influence her life.  And we also move forward to 1948 when she is about to publish The Franchise Affair, in fact we go with her to the launch party for The Franchise Affair.  So it takes three points in her life and see how different she is and of course there is the murder mystery in the 1915 part which has repercussions in the later time periods. Jenny:  Sounds fascinating!  I know you’ve mentioned that she wrote eight mysteries and this is going to be number eight for you.  Is there going to be a number nine or are you going to leave it at that like she did? Nicola:  No, there’s going to be a Number nine and a Number ten because I’ve just signed a contract for two more, so there definitely will be ten.  I’m working on Number Nine at the moment.  It made me smile a minute ago when you said you don’t do country houses and people sitting around solving mysteries.  This is actually a country house murder with a difference at Christmas, so it’s going to be a sort riff on the Golden Age Christmas mystery. Sir Stanley Spencer’s unconventional life: topic of Nicola’s new historical novel. Jenny:  Sounds wonderful.  Perhaps just moving away from the mysteries, you’ve got a stand-alone historical, Stanley and Elsie, coming out this year too and I gather that’s based on the unconventional family life of the artist Sir Stanley Spencer.  Tell us a little about that.  What genre is it?  I gather it wouldn’t be a mystery but not a memoir either. Nicola:  I think about this a lot really.  It’s a straight historical novel and I see it as very much connected to the Tey series in the sense that it is a re-imagining of a real figure in a particular time and place in the 1920s and 30s again.  No, it’s not a mystery in a generic sort of way but I’ve been thinking about how I approach the characters in that book and how I approach the ones in my mystery series and basically it is about fathoming and trying to understand and trying to get under the skin of why people do what they do.  And you said unconventional family life – I think most people would agree with you in that respect.  Stanley Spencer, as well as being a fantastic artist, a great, great artist, one of my favourite artists, also did some things in his life that I think some of us would find hard to fathom, and that’s exactly what you do when you write a crime novel.  You try to understand why people do the things they do and that’s not just a motive for murder but a motive for the everyday acts of love and jealousy and shame and greed.  And so from that respect I think it’s not entirely different.  It didn’t feel so different when I was writing it.  But it is a story that I’ve wanted to write about for several years now.  It’s inspired by Stanley Spencer’s creation of a First World War memorial chapel which he painted and it’s a beautiful, beautiful place in a Hampshire village.  Sandham Memorial Chapel – Sir Stanley Spencer But what really was my doorway into it was a lady called Elsie Munday who was the maid that he hired to look after his family when he went to that village and she became a very important figure.  She became a friend to him, a friend to his wife Hilda Carline and certainly to their children.  A really important member of the family as well as a muse for his work, so most of the book is told through her eyes.  And hopefully, to go back again to some of the themes of the Tey novels, it gives a voice to the women in Spencer’s life who were usually the silent presence in his paintings.  So it turns the tables on him a bit. Sir Stanley Spencer – the “women in his life” – a family portrait: DACS; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation Jenny:  That sounds wonderful.  Turning to your wider career, you divide your time between Cornwall and Cambridge and Cornwall is almost your writing base I gather, and when you’re in Cambridge you’ve got a lot of other exciting things that you do.  And that’s not so different from the way Josephine structured her life.  Is that just a coincidence?  Is that how it works for you – to have that dichotomy? Nicola:  You know, I’ve never really thought of it as having a connection to her, but of course you’re absolutely right, it does.  For us, from a practical point of view, it is the contrast between the two places that is wonderful.  In Cambridge there’s a lot going on, as you say.  It is a beautiful city with a great history and a great past but it’s a very man made beauty – the art and the architecture and the history of Cambridge is phenomenal.  But when you get to Cornwall it’s a very raw, elemental beauty and it is a different pace of life.  It’s a different type of beauty and it’s very inspirational in that sense. Joni Mitchell in ten songs – Eclectic Light show Jenny:  In Cambridge you do a radio show with your partner Mandy called The Eclectic Light Show and that in itself sounds fascinating.  I must admit I haven’t yet managed to listen to a full episode but I gather she does the music and you do the books and film reviews and you’ve already had Judy Collins on this year.  You draw some amazing guests.  Tell us a bit about that show. Nicola:  Mandy worked for 26 years at the BBC so it was a show that she started when she was at the BBC.  She has a music background herself, she had a band called Spriguns, later the Mandy Morton band.  They recorded six albums and toured quite extensively, so she has a music and broadcasting background.  We met through the radio and the theatre that I worked in and I started to do pieces on her BBC shows relating to the theatre and various arts things, so it’s kind of evolved naturally through that.  She does tend to do the music although this month she’s challenged me to tell the story of Joni Mitchell through ten songs, I mean how would you choose ten Joni Mitchell songs?  I couldn’t even narrow it down to ten Joni Mitchell albums I don’t think.  So I’ve got that on, and we do divide the others but really we take on what interests us and the people who fascinate us and whose creativity we have a great respect for.  It does tend to blur those lines of theatre, music and books and art.  But we nab what we like to do each month. Jenny:  So tell me, just a little technical question.  Can someone like me in New Zealand hear it?  It’s not up there as a podcast is it, or is it a podcast as well? Nicola:  All our Eclectic Light Shows are available on Mixcloud.  You go to Mixcloud and type in The Eclectic Light Show and you will see all the shows that we’ve done over the past few years and they’re there for people to listen whenever they like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrIPxlFzDi0&list=RDQMc97sE5J2r-0&start_radio=1 Jenny:  Fantastic, thank you.  I must admit I did pick up on the fact that you had seeded “London Rain” with lots of Rolling Stones references and as I was going through it I wasn’t absolutely searching but I did keep my eye out and I think I only really picked up on a couple – sympathy for the devil and wild horses was another one, but you had a little game there with Rolling Stones.  Obviously that was one of your tracks you played I gather while you were writing that book. Nicola:  I did.  I listened to the Rolling Stones a lot writing that book.  It came from the fact that within my books I like to mix different time periods.  I find that one age can be a fascinating mirror on another and so London Rain for example – the central death and mystery within that book is the death of a social club hostess who dies in the 1920s but it’s actually based on the suspicions and conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Brian Jones – the founder of The Rolling Stones in 1969.  Once I’d decided I’d do that, it became obvious to me how much a mirror image of each other the 60s and the 20s are.  They’re generations are coming out of a really difficult war; it’s a time of underground clubs and music and a really thriving drug scene and so I like to do that, and I’ve done it recently in Nine Lessons as well when I’ve taken a very 1970s crime, the Cambridge rapist, and put it back to the 1930s.  Again, those two periods seem to complement each other very, very well.  But you’re right, it seemed a fun thing to do for me, while I was writing that book, was to sprinkle a few of those titles in and see how many people would notice. Betsey Trotwood, Nicola’s talkative cat and writing companion Jenny:  If there’s one thing you’ve done in your writing career more than any other that’s been the secret of your success, what would it be? Nicola:  Oh, that’s a really difficult question.  In some ways you’d be better off to ask a reader that than me, but some of the things I’m proudest of would be maybe the characterisation and really bringing a richness and a credibility to those people.  That’s what people tell me they admire about the books.  But the thing I’m most pleased with is the fact that they entertain people.  When people come up to me at events and say they’ve read one of my books for a second time, for example, that’s a huge accolade because in a crime genre which is supposed to depend on the act of surprise, if somebody reads your book twice that’s a great accolade.  Or, people have said the books have got them through cancer perhaps, or some terrible time in their life, which a lot of authors will cite as something very important.  If people take your books to their heart in that respect and they choose that to get them through difficult times, that would be great.  But you know I think something that is emerging is the sexuality of the women in those books.  Tey is having a running affair with another character called Marta in these books and I get a lot of letters now from people whose grandmothers or aunts or mothers faced similar choices about being open about their sexuality or having to hide it.  And some of them were brave and went with it and had a lot of prejudices as a result.  Some of them chose easier paths and maybe didn’t ever have the happiness that they thought they might have.  But a lot of people are saying that it’s great that these books give a voice to those women because it was silenced and I think that’s important. Jenny:  And that’s possibly part of the reason that Josephine was regarded as a bit of a lone wolf.  She obviously was very aware of the path she was treading.  Being honest with herself but not laying herself open perhaps to too much public comment. Tey’s Inverness home: an escape from London Nicola:  Yes, I think that’s true.  That was part of it.  But I also think there was something inherent in her character that was a lone wolf.  I would be the first to admit that there is a lie in her relationship with Marta in my books but it’s not the lesbianism, it’s the closeness.  And I think that anybody who has read and loved The Franchise Affair like I do and who knows Marion Sharp’s speech to Robert Blair will recognise a lot of how Tey felt in that book. Jenny:  We’re starting to come to the end of our time together.  Turning to Nicola as reader – this is called The Joys of Binge Reading so we need to reference your reading a little bit – I don’t know if you really are a binge reader because you read so deeply that possibly the whole concept of binge reading is something that doesn’t appeal very much, but tell us a little about your reading tastes. Celia Fremlin – lost masterpiece Nicola:  OK.  I’m ashamed to admit that since I started spending so much of my time writing crime novels I don’t read as much crime fiction as I should do or as I used to.  Somebody who I am – I can’t binge read because she’s not fully in print at the moment – but a recent discovery of mine is a book that Sabre brought out at Christmas, Celia Fremlin, and she is a wonderful author and they are bringing her books out and I’ve had to stop myself looking for them on line and getting them, because I would binge read her.  But I actually don’t want it all to be over. If you can hear a little squealing noise here, its not me, its my cat Betsey Trotwood!!! Jenny:  What are her books like, or what are they about?  Is she a rediscovered classic? Nicola:  She’s another great psychological crime writer.  She’s a bit later than Tey but she’s great.  I love Barbara Pym, I love Irish fiction, I am an absolute fool for a Virago classic so people like Rebecca West, Stella Gibbons – I love her work.  It’s one of the hardest things – when people ask you what you read to come up with all these books, and I’m going to kick myself for forgetting some people, but they would be the people who most recently I’ve loved their books. Jenny:  Circling back, looking across your life as it is at the moment, at this stage, if you were doing it all again, is there anything you would do differently? Nicola:  Do you know, I’ve been so lucky.  I have a fantastic job that I love doing.  I’m very happily married, I had a great upbringing and childhood, so it would almost be churlish to say there’d be things I would do differently.  I suppose if there was one thing, I wish it would have been possible to cling onto the theatre job and the writing job for longer, because at times I still miss working in theatre.  I wasn’t on the stage, I was behind the scenes in theatre marketing, but I loved that sense of common endeavour and teamwork and all that sort of thing.  So if there was one thing I miss it’s that kind of camaraderie. Jenny:  Yes.  What is next for Nicola the writer?  Any new projects that you’re working on? Mandy Morton No 2 Feline Detective Agency Nicola:  Yes, there’s the Christmas mystery that I’ve told you about and there’ll be a lot of promotion coming up for Stanley and Elsie and Sorry for the Dead but I’ve got an idea for another historical novel that isn’t a crime novel, another stand alone novel, so I’ll be gradually starting to think about that as well.  Mandy is also a crime writer.  She writes a series called The No. 2 Feline Detective Agency.  They’re wonderful dark and funny books and we’re starting to devise a series that we’ll work on together so that’s in the pipeline as well. Jenny:  Oh, that’s exciting.  Now, do you like to interact with your readers and where can they find you online, or is it mainly through your appearances that you see your readers? Nicola:  I love to.  I’m on Twitter, they can find me at Nicola Upson Books.  I’m also on Facebook but I am appalling at Facebook.  I really don’t go on as often as I should but Twitter is probably the way to interact on a regular basis.  And l do love meeting people at events as well.  And doing blogs and having chat like this – I’m really enjoying this very much too. Jenny:  Look it’s been wonderful to talk, it really has.  It’s quite interesting to me how there’s been a real blossoming of fiction related to this period that we’ve been talking about and I think of a couple of the authors that I’ve already talked to that are writing books set in this period.  I think it’s interesting paralleled with the Me Too thing too that there really is quite a sense of contemporary life coming out of that re-examination of the 20s and 30s. Kate Adie book – research for Sorry for the Dead Nicola:  Yes, I think that’s true, and long may it last because it’s such an engrossing and interesting period because it’s a period of such diversity too, and I think lots of the women who worked quietly at their particular professions were so pioneering for the work that we do today.  In the research for Sorry for the Dead I read a book by Kate Aide about women on the home front in the First World War and it just shows in every single sphere of life, whether it’s policing or farming or sport – they really were paving the way for people like us who’ve come later. Jenny:  Thank you so much for your time Nicola.  It’s been a real pleasure.  I will go and read some Josephine Tey.  Actually it’s one of those things – because I have to do so much reading for this and for other things that I honestly don’t get much time just to do reading for pleasure which I’m sure you might identify with.  It’s ironic that a person who loves reading now – well of course the books I read for the podcast I do very much enjoy – but just to have something I pick up entirely for myself, I don’t have much time to do anymore. Nicola:  I’m quite envious of you because I really wish that there was one finished Tey book that I hadn’t read.  You are in for such a treat. Jenny:  That’s wonderful.  Thank you so much and all the best with this year and your writing. If you enjoy Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey mysteries you may also enjoy Jessica Fellowes’ Mitford Murders or Tessa Lunney’s Kiki in Paris, murder mysteries set in a similar period and place. Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]