Nicola Upson: The Book That…
What do writers read? Nicola Upson, whose books Angel with Two Faces and An Expert in Murder feature a heroine in the form of Golden Age crime writer Josephine Tey, tells us about the books that have made her laugh, cry, kept her awake at night, and more.
The book that I first loved…
The Swish of the Curtain by Pamela Brown
I was absolutely hooked on The Swish of the Curtain from the moment I picked it up; to this day, it’s the only book I’ve ever started again as soon as I finished it. It’s the story of seven stage-struck children who transform a disused chapel into The Blue Door Theatre after one of them throws a stone through the window, and Brown wrote it when she was about fourteen.
The book came out in 1941, and part of its charm is the nostalgia of the setting, the lost world of England before the war which seemed such an appealing place to spend time in; part of it is the diversity of characters – the drama queen, the handsome artistic older boy, the anarchic youngest sister, all of whom are very real. But mostly it’s about the excitement of theatre; for someone so young, Brown had an amazing knowledge of stage management and the practicalities of putting on a play, but she never lost sight of the sheer joy of it, and she gave people like me – who recoil in horror from being on-stage – the chance to have that adventure vicariously.
I must have been eight or nine when I first read it, and I remember thinking how brave and grown up those children were – God, they were sophisticated. Having re-read it recently, I’m ashamed to admit that I still find them so – and I realise now how many of my career decisions are down to this book.
I keep by my bedside…
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
I love going back to books I’ve read before, so – as well as the book that I’m reading for the first time – there’ll always be a past favourite. At the moment, it’s Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, which I discovered when I was at university and have never got out of my head: it’s that sort of book.
Nightwood doesn’t make for comfortable bedtime reading: it’s a bleak and brilliant analysis of everything that’s noble and fated about love, written in a language which throws away the textbook and vividly exploits the tensions of its age – the rise of Hitler, the backlash against lesbianism, the fear of the stranger; but it’s a brilliant novel to read more than once because it’s different every time – a fairground mirror of a book, extreme in every way and brutally honest, yet subtle and elusive at the same time.
I want to read next is…
Talking About Detective Fiction by P. D. James
For me, P.D. James has done more than any other author to modernise the crime novel, and she’s shown that you can do so and stay true to its traditions.
The idea of sitting down with her as she takes you on an informal history of the detective novel and talks about her own writing is such a treat for anyone who loves crime fiction.
I loved as a child…
The Rupert Annual
My parents have given me a Rupert annual every Christmas since I was born, and I still look forward to it. They’re miniature masterpieces of children’s literature – funny, magical, full of exotic adventures, and made all the more special by the fact that their unique fictional world is created by a combination of words and pictures. Thanks to Rupert, I’ve continued to love illustrated books of any sort, and I have an unfashionable soft-spot for poetry that rhymes.
Kept me awake at night…
Fred and Edie by Jill Dawson
I don’t suppose I’m unusual in having a horror of capital punishment, and in particular of hanging, which borders on a phobia – so Jill Dawson’s fictional recreation of the Thompson and Bywaters case from the 1920s was always going to keep me awake. The passages in which we follow Edith Thompson to her execution are intense, claustrophobic, and devastating, but what disturbed me most was how easily Thompson became caught in a chain of events which led to her paying the ultimate price.
Most crime writers have a competitive impulse to create the most imaginative and unpleasant murder they can (for me, the benchmark is in Shroud for a Nightingale), and that sometimes makes our killers more remarkable than they should be; I suspect, in most cases, the truth is closer to what the hangman Albert Pierrepoint wrote in his autobiography, that murderers are ‘ordinary people, caught on the wrong foot’. They fall in love with the wrong person; they make a mistake, and then another one to cover it up; they try to right an injustice and it gets out of hand – and those are all very easy emotions to identify with. None of us are immune to them, given the right – or the wrong – circumstances.
Made me laugh…
A Thatched Roof by Beverley Nichols
Except for my partner, people never give me books these days. Either they think I’ve got enough, or they don’t know where to start. But a few years ago, just after we bought a thatched cottage, some friends gave me the second volume of Beverley Nichols’s famous trilogy. I’d never heard of Nichols at the time – he’s most famous now for his gardening books, and I can only prune under strict supervision – but now I can’t imagine what a summer would be like without him. His style is extravagantly poetic, and probably infuriates as many people as it charms, but there’s a shameless eccentricity and bitchiness about his humour that I love if I’m in the right mood.
Made me cry…
At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill
I’m not sure why, but Irish fiction makes me cry more than anything else; The Story of Lucy Gault would have been another contender, or That They May Face the Rising Sun. But At Swim, Two Boys is that rare thing – a book that breaks your heart, and makes you glad it’s broken.
Set in Dublin in the year leading up to the Easter Rising, it’s the story of a friendship between two boys of different classes which becomes a tender and unpredictable love story – and it’s one of those epic, once-in-a-lifetime books that, had you written it, you’d be tempted to lay down your pen and never waste another word on trying to emulate it. I read it on a summer holiday in Cornwall three or four years ago, and sobbed my way through the final pages; God knows what the other people on the beach thought, but I was far too involved to care.
Changed my life…
The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey
If it weren’t for Josephine Tey, I wouldn’t be writing fiction. The series of novels which feature her as a character began as a failed biography; now, I’m forever grateful to her for rolling up the carpet of her life sufficiently to force me down another path.
The Franchise Affair was the first of her novels that I read, and it remains my favourite; on the surface, it’s a product of the Golden Age which people think of with a wave of nostalgia and warmth; but it’s also a subversive book, way ahead of its time in the way that it explores the after-effects of crime, mob violence, persecution by the press, and the penalties of not behaving in the way that’s expected of you.
But that’s Tey’s great genius – to create a story which can be read on many levels, and which differs according to its audience. The more I find out about her, the more I realise that she played that trick with her life, too, and just as effectively.
