Nicola Upson’s debut, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels to feature Josephine Tey — one of Britain’s finest Golden Age crime writers – and was dramatised for BBC Radio 4. Several of Nicola’s novels have been listed for the CWA Gold and Historical Daggers, and Sorry for the Dead was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month. Praised as a ‘perfect Christmas crime story’ by Elly Griffiths, her latest novel The Christmas Clue was published in September 2025.

Caitlin

Hi Nicola, thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

Nicola

Caitlin, it’s absolutely my pleasure.

Caitlin

Thank you. How are you today? I know you’ve been on a bit of a book tour, and that’s still ongoing. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Nicola

Yes, it’s only just really started. The book we’re going to talk about, The Christmas Clue, is obviously very seasonal. It came out in September, but most of the events are only kicking in now that everyone dares to say the Christmas word. We’re almost half-decently into the season now!

We’ve done some local libraries—some events I’ve done alone for The Christmas Clue, and some I’ve done with my partner, Mandy Morton, who has also written a Christmas novella, Six Tales at Midnight, in her series. So we’re doing some events together.

We’re really just beginning, so we’re still feeling fresh and ready for the road. We’ll be a bit wearier by the end of the month!

Caitlin

I’m sure it’ll be great to visit all the different cities and places.

Nicola
Absolutely. Most people at these events are having their first mince pie of the season. I suspect we’ll be heartily sick of mince pies by the time December actually arrives.

But it’s lovely to see how excited people are, and to feel the warmth for the Cluedo origins of the book—which I definitely want to talk about.

Caitlin

Yes. I’m definitely a ‘Christmas starts in November’ type of person, so reading this early was right up my street. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about The Christmas Clue and its Cluedo influence?

Nicola

Absolutely. It celebrates someone I discovered a few years ago. Many people will know that I write a long-running series with Josephine Tey as the lead character. About seven years ago, when I was writing a book in that series, The Dead of Winter, which is also a Christmas mystery, I was researching typical interwar country house parties. One name kept coming up: Anthony Pratt.

I’d never heard of him, but he was a well-known pianist in the 1920s and 30s. He accompanied the foremost Wagnerian soprano of her day, Kirsten Flagstad. He would entertain at country house parties, and he also played on cruise ships. But he became more famous during the Second World War, when he and his wife, Elva, invented Cluedo.

I became fascinated by their story. I’ve loved Cluedo since childhood, it was the board game of choice in our house. I think it got me into crime fiction long before I read Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey. So I owed Anthony Pratt a lot, without even knowing his name. I wanted to include Anthony and Elva as characters in The Dead of Winter, but the plot changed and one of the characters needed to be deeply unpleasant, so I couldn’t base them on real people. I had to invent characters instead. But Anthony and Elva sat on my shoulder for years, waiting for their own book. I knew the story was too good for cameos.

The Christmas Clue is their book. They are the lead detectives. The premise is that they’re invited to stage a murder mystery weekend at a hotel called Tudor Close—and of course, the murder mystery goes horribly wrong.

The book traces the origins of Cluedo, we see them inventing the game that would become Cluedo, but it also puts them centre stage as detectives.

Caitlin
I really enjoyed reading it. I grew up playing Cluedo too, actually a Simpsons edition! I didn’t know anything about who created it, so learning that was fascinating.

Nicola
It was very much a partnership. Elva, Anthony’s wife, was a talented amateur artist. She designed the classic board we all recognise. Anthony was a real crime fiction devotee, Raymond Chandler was his favourite. He was also fascinated by true crime. His daughter, Marcia, who I’m now in touch with, said that on holidays he’d always point out local crime scenes!

He even used to play piano at a hotel frequented by the famous ‘hanging judge,’ Justice Avery. Anthony absorbed all those stories, and when you play Cluedo, you feel that fascination—logic, deduction, elimination. The way you play Cluedo is the way you read a Golden Age detective novel.

And interestingly, it’s how I write crime novels: I don’t plot everything in advance. I start writing and gradually eliminate possibilities until I find the solution.

Caitlin

I saw in the acknowledgments that you’d spoken with Marcia. How was that, and how important was it to stay true to her parents’ personalities?

Nicola

It was incredibly important. They’re her parents, she knows them better than anyone. The versions of them in the book aren’t necessarily the people she remembers, but I wanted to capture their essence and their achievements.
I didn’t send her the book until it was finished. I emailed her first, explained the premise, and asked if I could send a proof. She replied straight away, very kind, and said she’d inherited her father’s love of crime fiction, so it sounded like the kind of book she’d enjoy. That was such a relief!

She read it, loved it, and took it in exactly the spirit in which it was written. She said something that touched me deeply: that the book made her think more about who her parents were before she was born. Because the book is set in 1943 and 1949, before her time.

It helped her get to know her parents differently. That meant a great deal to me.

I’ve found over the years that sometimes by making things up, you get closer to the truth of someone. That was true in this book, and also in another novel I wrote, Stanley and Elsie, about the painter Stanley Spencer. His daughter Shirin actually came to the launch—my first time having a character from my books attend an event!

But with The Christmas Clue, Marcia’s approval was incredibly important. The book would have been much less joyful without it.

Caitlin

Much like a game of Cluedo, different pieces of information are revealed to help us uncover what’s happening. How much did the narrative evolve for you while writing? And when you realised Anthony and Elva deserved their own book, was this the moment The Christmas Clue was born?

Nicola

When I realised they’d eventually have their own book, I didn’t know how it would come about. But last year, quite unexpectedly, Faber and I started discussing a Christmas book. They needed one for this year, so I had to temporarily abandon the Josephine Tey I was writing.

I wrote The Christmas Clue in a couple of months, from September to December, and I had such fun. I’ve never enjoyed writing a book so much.
There are many Cluedo riffs, possibly more than is decent for such a short book! There’s a close circle of suspects that echoes the original game’s characters. I even have a character called Colonel Coleman, which made me laugh for days.

Early versions of Cluedo had more players and different colours, Colonel Mustard was Colonel Yellow, Reverend Green had to become Mr Green in America. There were more weapons too: a bomb, syringe, axe, cudgel, poker. I show all that in the book.

And structurally, because this book is 35,000 words, compared to 90,000 for a Josephine, I had to be more disciplined. Unusually for me, I knew the twist from the start. My challenge was to hold my nerve and make sure it landed. I didn’t even tell Mandy, because I wanted to test the twist on her!

There is a dark thread running through the book, and I didn’t want to avoid that just because it’s Christmas. Emotions are heightened at Christmas—sadness as well as joy. But the book is unashamedly fun. I couldn’t wait to get to my desk each day to get back to Anthony and Elva. It was a revelation that you can write happy characters and still make them interesting.

Caitlin

How did you balance such a large cast of suspects with such a short word count?

Nicola

I decided early on there would only be two narrative viewpoints: Anthony’s and Elva’s. Normally, I would go into suspects’ minds, but with 35,000 words, I didn’t have space. So the reader knows only what Anthony and Elva know, in real time over that Christmas weekend.

It mirrors real life—you don’t get to deeply know strangers over a weekend, but you learn what’s pertinent.

It also helps the reader stay close to Anthony and Elva. The book succeeds or fails on whether you like them. And although the story is dark, it ends with warmth, hope, and family, what we want at Christmas, or any time of year.

Caitlin

Tudor Close Hotel is a real place. How did you develop it into the perfect Christmas-crime setting?

Nicola
In some ways, it was already perfect. When Cluedo first came out in 1949, the original subtitle was Murder at Tudor Close. Tudor Close in Rottingdean was a real and very well-known hotel, described as the loveliest hotel on the south coast.

It looks Tudor, built with wood from Tudor warships, but it was actually constructed in 1929. Originally seven houses, later turned into a hotel. Hollywood stars loved it—Bette Davis, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Charles Laughton. I found a 1930s brochure on eBay, and you can see why: luxury, privacy, discretion.

For crime fiction, it’s perfect: creaky, atmospheric, full of rooms and comings and goings. The churchyard next door is beautiful and atmospheric. The village has that delicious village gossip energy—Murder at the Vicarage vibes. And it’s on the coast, so you get that drama too.

It truly felt like being in a sweet shop of settings.

Caitlin

There’s even a secret passageway in the book—is that real?

Nicola

Rottingdean was famous for smugglers, including a smuggler-vicar called Reverend Hooker. There are tunnels under the village. So yes, I thought: can I really include a secret passage? And then I thought, why not! It’s Christmas, it’s Cluedo, let’s go for it.

Caitlin

How did you balance festive fun with the darker thread running through the book?

Nicola

It took the most thought. Ultimately, I had to stay true to the characters. Anthony and Elva are ordinary people who did a remarkable thing. They have wartime worries, but they’re united, they make each other laugh, and they react like real people would.

When something terrible happens, Anthony’s reaction isn’t that of a seasoned detective—it’s ‘Oh God, what now?’ That felt right.

As for the darker storyline, you rely on empathy. Crime writers rarely have personal experience of the awful things they write about, so you read accounts, you imagine, you try to inhabit how it feels.

The writing is a little more spare than my longer novels, but hopefully the balance feels instinctive.

Caitlin

What do you think makes crime novels so popular at Christmas?

Nicola

It’s interesting, isn’t it? I love reading crime at Christmas, and ghost stories too. I think it’s partly that a good crime novel is such a satisfying story: beginning, middle, end; characters to invest in; something immersive at a chaotic time of year.

When we were writing our Christmas books, Mandy writing hers, me writing mine, we actually had a simpler, calmer Christmas! We weren’t out in the shopping chaos. There’s something comforting about sitting down with a book while the world is frantic.

Maybe crime fiction makes you feel safe. Terrible things happen, but to other people. You escape into the story.

As for ‘cosy crime’—it isn’t a term I love. I prefer ‘Golden Age’. The Christmas Clue isn’t cosy in terms of its central crime. But Anthony and Elva bring goodness, warmth, and decency. If that’s considered cosy, I’m happy with it.

But cosy crime can feel false when the world returns unchanged at the end. No one is untouched by violence. Everyone in this book is changed. But they cling to love, family, and doing the right thing.

Caitlin

Finally, when this episode airs the world will be knee-deep in Christmas festivities, and listeners may be inspired to write a Christmas crime story of their own. Do you have any advice that you could share with them?

Nicola

If listeners want to write a Christmas crime story, my advice is: enjoy it. That’s what people respond to with this book, they can tell I had fun.
Books aren’t always fun to write. Many of my Josephine books have had moments of despair where the plot won’t behave. But this book was joyful.
So: relax into it. Indulge every seasonal cliché you want. But make sure there’s a strong story at its heart.

Caitlin

Thank you, Nicola. I definitely recommend our listeners pick up, or gift, a copy of The Christmas Clue this festive season. I really enjoyed it. Thanks again for joining us.

Nicola

Thank you, Caitlin. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and a happy Christmas to you and all the listeners.

Caitlin

Happy Christmas! Thank you.