Shot with Crimson
This is the 11th historical crime novel featuring the investigative double act of novelist Josephine Tey and Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose. Here the real-life heroine (Tey being one of the pseudonyms of Elizabeth MacKintosh, 1896-1952) is thrust far from her historical existence with a September 1939 journey via the Queen Mary and the Super Chief train to Hollywood, and the film set for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.
Meanwhile back in England, the forbidding mansion Milton Hall (one of the inspirations for Daphne Du Maurier’s Manderley) happens to be the setting for a killing which Penrose is assigned to investigate. A story of murders and near-murders, whose murky roots lie in World War I days when the Hall was a military hospital, is enlivened by the ingenious insertion of personages such as Hitchcock, his wife and daughter, Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Du Maurier herself. The studio scenes are enjoyable, though the connections with Penrose’s investigation back in England are rather contrived, Josephine being given little to do apart from observe the filming, and have explicatory conversations.
The author’s research is admirable: the filming of Rebecca is a fascinating story in itself – whilst their home country entered into total war, from the safety of Hollywood a British director and actors reenacted Britain at peace. The California coast stood in for the Cornish beaches. Upson shows how the scriptwriters had to weaken the book’s ending due to the Hollywood production code. There is also a sub-plot in which young Patricia Hitchcock is kidnapped, though readers who have seen her acting in Strangers on a Train will know that she will be safely returned. Possibly more successful as a re-creation than as a thriller, this remains a rewarding read. Anyone who does not know the story of Rebecca should beware spoilers.
