Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Shot with Crimson. Nicola Upson. Faber. £16.99. Publ. 7.11.23.
September 1939: World War Two has just started and the liner Queen Mary is steaming across the Atlantic carrying Americans heading home, a few English fleeing the expected bombs - and a Scottish crime novelist, Josephine Tey, on a brief visit to her lover in Hollywood.
In California Hitchcock is having problems as he tries to make the film of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca.He’s at odds with his producer; Laurence Olivier is being bitchy on the set, and Joan Fontaine is terrified of her co-star. On the other hand a perfect location has been found that resembles Cornwall (Big Sur, pity about the poison ivy) and the set designer has crafted exquisite miniatures to simulate rooms in an ancient English mansion.
A newcomer to Upson may be confused by the juxtaposition of fiction and fact, or apparent fact. Hitchcock wasmaking Rebecca on the eve of WW2 and Josephine Tey was a real person but there is no record of Tey’s having visited Hollywood and certainly her private life was a closed book. Regardless, Upson has adopted her as a series character, coupling her in an unlikely partnership with a happily married family man, DCI Archie Penrose. Together they solve crimes and they solve one here: communicating by telephone across continents. They are well-connected: there is mention of Bernard Spilsbury in one of their cases.
In a story where Bob Hope may be encountered in a lift and Clark Gable on the stairs a change of gear is required of the reader, but once it’s accepted that the author knows what she’s about one can go with the flow; then fact and fiction blend and plots start to coalesce. For this is a book of parts where threads become plots, where sad and terrible events are linked by two wars, by characters who survived the first, and by a real house in the Fen country that stands in for the fictitious Manderley.
Upson has caught something of the spirit of the thirties from the opulence of an ocean liner to the splendid vulgarity of Hollywood: glamour masking instability, cosmic and personal. It’s a theatrical book, scenes switching neatly in time and space, and all permeated with the theme of obsession that haunts the production: from Upson’s reading of Rebecca to Hitchcock’s take on the story. Devotees of du Maurier and Tey will love it or shun it; some will find it impertinent but no one can deny that it’s intriguing.
