A.N. Wilson immerses himself in crime fiction

Josephine Tey was once famous as both a crime novelist and a playwright. She was a far better writer than most of her contempor­aries, such as Sayers and Christie. Her novel The Franchise Affair is about England, about childhood innocence broken, about the mystery of human character. Those in the know read and reread. Nicola Upson had the ingenious idea of making Tey the heroine of a series of crime novels. Less whodunnits than whydunnits, they convey much of Tey’s own sense of place, and of human nature. The latest, Sorry for the Dead (Faber &?Faber, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69), draws its title from a phrase of Virginia Woolf’s, and it takes Josephine to Charleston Farmhouse before it was inhabited by the Bloomsbury set. She worked there, in Upson’s version, as a physical training instructor, when it was a horticultural college run by a pair called Harry (Harriet) and George (Georgiana). The death of a young student, falling from a height through the glasshouses, is the event which haunts Josephine, Harry and George throughout the novel, which hops about from era to era between 1915 and 1948. Beside wondering how the young student, Dorothy, met her end, the reader has much to ponder – about the past, about pacifism in the two world wars, and about the malice directed by society against those who love their own sex. A terrific novel.