Setting the Stage for Murder

Among fiction’s “celebrity detectives,” we’ve already had Groucho Marx, Jacques Futrelle, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Issac Newton, Jack London, Will Porter (aka O. Henry), and Louisa May Alcott, so why not Josephine Tey?

Publishing News reports that Scottish playwright Tey, who also wrote the highly praised historical mystery The Daughter of Time (1951), will herself star in “a new series of [historical] detective novels by Nicola Upson, who has worked in theatre management and been crime fiction reviewer for the New Statesman.” The first of at least two books, An Expert in Murder, will be set in the 1930s and spotlight Tey, “who divided her time between Scotland and the West End, enjoying extraordinary success and launching the career of John Gielgud, among others.”

(Hat tip to Euro Crime.)