However, once I had a look online I found others who didn’t get this one either, which was I bit of a relief and I figured it wasn’t just me after all!

As the train moved south, effortlessly eating into four hundred miles or so of open fields and closed communities, she noticed that spring had come early to England–as quick to grace the gentle countryside as it had been to enhance the drama of the hills against a Highland sky.Clues and circumstance suggest that Tey may have been the intended target, so the narrative follows her and her time at the theatre.

We delve more deeply into motivation and the angst of both good guys and criminals than in most of the more action-driven mysteries of today. Tey meets a young fan on the train down from Scotland to London, and almost immediately the fan is murdered; Tey helps her old friend Detective Inspector Archie Penrose of the Yard sort out not only this crime but a passel of related ones.I do have another play or two on the go, and my publisher wants a second mystery story at some point, so there’s plenty to keep me busy. When Elspeth reappeared, Josephine shook off her insistence that the bill should be halved and they headed back to their compartment. The young girl's death touches her and the reader deeply and finding the real connection between her killer and Tey, Tey's play and the deaths of the victims to come, is the meat and potatoes of this book. Archie Penrose, investigates and soon learns that the victim was adopted under irregular circumstances. The plot has more twists than a corkscrew and concentration is needed if you're not going to lose track of what's happening.

We take pride in offering a wide selection of used books, from classics to hidden gems, ensuring there is something for every literary palate. How observant of you,’ she said, embarrassed to see that the other occupants of the carriage were taking a new interest in their travelling companion.The short version of the story is that OH got me the fourth book in the series for Christmas because it features Portmeirion, which we both love. I gather there are more Archie Penrose mysteries on the way, and I'd not be at all surprised if I found myself reading them. I liked this a little more than you did, as a pastiche, but that was before I started reading Josephine Tey.

This book's literary import is the author Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896-1952), who published mystery fiction as Josephine Tey, in reality purely a publishing pseudonym but given to her by Upson as a character name. The hand that gripped the back of her neck, holding her close, was swift and sure, and by now no strength was needed. I had various people in mind as the murderer but never even considered the real culprit – although it was obvious when I looked back. The train seemed almost deserted, the only noise coming from further down the car where staff were presumably preparing for the next journey. As the girl settled herself in, Josephine gazed at her in fascination, but it was not so much her features that drew attention as the remarkable hat that framed them–a cloche, made of fine black straw, which was accentuated on one side by a curled white ostrich feather, flecked with beige and brown and attached by a long, black-tipped hatpin.Standing back against the window to allow everyone else to gather their belongings, they took a minute to compose themselves sufficiently to leave the compartment. Some aspects of the book are very sad and poignant, but I think they would have been even stronger in a wholly fictional construction, rather than in this half-fiction/half-fact way of taking a person's life and some known events, then adding imaginary melodrama, characters, actions and feelings. Mark Lawson wrote of the book that "the novel uses crime fiction's past to entertaining present ends. Let’s go and have something to eat,’ she suggested to Elspeth, conscious that the young woman’s enthusiasm for her work was beginning to wear a little thin with everyone else in the compartment. The ornate station clock declared that it was a quarter past eight when the train finally left the mouth of the station and moved slowly out into the countryside.