SORRY FOR THE DEAD

Summer, 1915: a young woman falls to her death at the Charleston Farmhouse on the Sussex Downs. But was it an accident?

Twenty years later, Josephine Tey is faced with the accusation that it was murder and that she was complicit in the crime. Can she clear her name and uncover the truth, exposing the darkest secrets of that apparently idyllic summer?

(Apologies if this review’s a bit rubbish but it’s really late, and I can’t work out the new updates lol)

This was an impulse grab when I got to the till in Waterstones (I loved the old school Agatha Christie vibe from the cover. And I mean who doesn’t love a good murder mystery?) but I’d never read a Nicola Upson book before, so I didn’t know this was part of a series (whoops). Luckily I don’t think it affected the story in any way, despite not knowing the history/relationships of the characters, so you can read it as a standalone if, like me, you’re also new to the series.

Sorry For The Dead is a historical crime novel set in wartime Britain that centres around Josephine Tey, a famous writer of murder mysteries who, much like Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher, finds herself solving an unprecedented amount of murders for someone who’s not in the police force. But this time, it’s personal. She travels back to the place where it all began in an effort to put the past behind her and the novel follows, switching between 1948 to 1915 as her time spent as a teacher to young girls at a farmhouse, where we witness the events leading up to the murder of one of the students, the repercussions, and social stigma attached to being a gay woman at the time.

You could argue that Sorry For The Dead is as much a social commentary as it is a whodunnit, though if you’re after the fast pace of a Christie novel you might be disappointed, or at the very least struggle a bit with the more relaxed pacing like I did. And the frequent switching between the two time periods definitely contributes to that. Although you can’t say Upson wastes any words on filler. Her writing throughout is just so concise. Take this example:

Harriet could see how well earned the principal’s reputation for fairness was; the speech would have left no reasonable room for objections, even if she had had the heart to raise them. She nodded, and Gertrude Ingham seemed relieved that the occasion was at least going to remain dignified on both sides; the regret in her face seemed genuine, and Harriet sensed a sympathy for their situation, if not an understanding.

If anything, she could have added a little more description, because it’s a female heavy cast, and beyond first introductions we’re not really given any reminders about what the characters look like. In a similar fashion the dialogue is fairly interchangeable, and there were a couple of instances where I was confused by who was speaking.

It does pick up a little nearer the end which was nice (lately I’ve zoned out of books by the halfway mark), although I was a little disappointed that the murderer was someone I’d suspected, but thought might have been too obvious. (Giving someone else a strong motive wouldn’t have hurt. Just saying).

I did feel the accusations made against Josephine were quickly brushed off once it had fulfilled its duty as the inciting incident and the story was well underway, and I would have liked a bit more urgency for ‘present day’ Josephine where the murder plot was concerned. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve not read a Josephine Tey mystery before, but I’d hope she’s more involved in crime solving than she was here. I’d say there was less of the detective seeking-out-clues trope that you’d expect to find in a crime novel, and I didn’t see anything about her that made her stand out as an amateur sleuth. I mean she doesn’t even work out who the murderer is by the end (and yes, for anyone else who’s read it, I’m well aware that the points Josephine makes regarding her new book, saying “nothing is ever quite as straight-forward as it seems, and sometimes justice and the law are very different things” draw an obvious comparison to the themes of the novel itself.) So perhaps it’s only in this novel that she’s a little less active in the crime solving. The ending is a sad one, but I did like how it wraps neatly around the rest of the narrative and back to the very beginning of the book.

An interesting fact that I wasn’t aware of until I’d finished the book, was that the Josephine Tey novels are based on a real person, Scottish author Elizabeth MacKintosh, whose real life pseudonym was Josephine Tey. Makes you appreciate all the attention to detail Upton’s put in her work, and would make it that much more appealing to fans of historical fiction.

3.5/5