The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

English Fiction

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in the run-up to Christmas. I feel I’m starting a new reading tradition for myself: finishing the year off with a couple of crime books. I think what grabbed me about this book is the fact that it uses the couple that invented the board game Cluedo, which is written by Nicola Upson whom I have seen talking a lot about golden age of crime writing and this book is set in the time well middle of world war two when people had to make there own entertainment the coupole at the heart of the boo comes up with the game. But what Nicola Upson imagines is that the pair had run a murder game in the house they eventually used as the template for the Cluedo board.

They pressed on, passing through familiar villages in good time and picking up the Rottingdean road just as the light was beginning to fade. It’s hard to believe that we’re almost at the coast, Elva said, peering through the windscreen at the pretty cottages and village greens that were synonymous with rural England. ‘You’d never know that all the drama of the sea was barely a mile away. I think that’s what I love most about this place. You get the best of both worlds, so you never tire of either of them?

‘Murder at the Vicarage and Rebecca all rolled into one?Anthony said, and laughed as she raised her eyes to the heavens.Dean Court Road is the next turning on the left?She nodded but didn’t slow down, and Anthony repeated the direction. ‘Well, it was the next left, he said, staring back over his shoulder. Now you’ll have to go round the pond and come back?

As the head off to set up there murder weekend in high spirits

The book follows Anthony and Elva Pratt, a couple who, in 1943, arranged for a small hotel in the village of Rottingdean to host a murder-mystery weekend. They have the fake weapons for the murder weekend and have chosen the Tudor house as the setting for the weekend. Anthony had played the piano at the hotel before the war.  But when they arrive and call at a local shop and find the shopkeeper dead, their murder mystery weekend becomes all too real, especially when it turns out the sister of the dead woman happens to work at the Tudor house hotel. What follows is that the death is connected tpo the collection of guests in the hotel, and the dean sets out to solve the actual crime. But the hotel guests are, in a way, the templates for the Cluedo game: a single woman, a military man, the hotel manager, and the sister. Miss Silver, the cook, may know more about why the shopkeeper has died.

‘My money would be on last-minute chocolates for his wife? Elva pulled into the space that the other car had just vacated, a neat dark rectangle amid the covering of white.

‘At least Miss Silver’s not staying open just for us?

The shop was one of a terrace of small cottages, identical to its neighbours except for the colourful array of sweets and novelties in the window and a discreet sign above the door: Miss E. Silver, Tobacconist and Confec-tioner, est. 1929. ‘You could trace my whole childhood in those jars, Anthony said, looking wistfully at the gob-stoppers, humbugs and sugar mice. ‘It must be a lovely thing to own a sweet shop, don’t you think? You’d only ever have happy customers?

They visit the shop but get more than chocolates there !

I loved how she worked the real life inventors of Cluedo intpo a classic slice of Golden age criome in a way the classic country house or in the case hotel a collection of people gathered together sterotypes like in the game but also in a lot of christie novels the characters all fit a type a single woman a vixen of sort a mitltary man, stasff and a couple of mysterious figures. We have all here, plus nods to the classic game they invented based on this hotel, a cast of characters, and, like in the car, a lot of ways to kill someone on hand. Then to set it all at Christmas is just so clever. I can see this being a Christmas read for years for fans of classic golden-age crime fiction, as well as books that take real-life people on a Journey. I also think it has a TV drama written all over it as well!