Cosy crime for Christmas: a choice of thrillers |
Christmas is prime time for cosy crime and the excellent thriller writer Nicola Upson offers a short, pleasing contribution with The Christmas Clue (Faber, £10). As in her longer novels, where she uses the real-life figure of Josephine Tey as her heroine, here she fronts a couple – Anthony and Elva Pratt – who also existed, and who invented the classic boardgame Cluedo.
It is 1943, and the Pratts decide to return to the resort hotel, Tudor Close, where they used to work, Anthony as the house pianist and the two together as creators of whodunnit entertainments for the guests. The idea is that it should be a respite from Anthony’s war work at an engineering factory.
The largely unpeopled landscape of Benbecula is unrelentingly stark but also curiously beautiful
Stopping at a shop en route to pick up Elva’s gift of a box of cigars for her husband, the pair discover the owner on the floor of her kitchen, apparently battered to death. At Tudor Close, they soon find a handful of suspects, including the local vicar, a colonel from the Canadian RAF and a mystery woman who has commandeered the hotel’s finest suite. They also unearth links between the victim and the living. With wartime pressures restricting the availability of actors, the Pratts combine their theatrical skills with new ones as amateur sleuths. Soon there is another murder for them to investigate.
The tone, light throughout,........