The Christmas Clue - Nicola Upson ****
By Brian Clegg
This entertaining Christmas mystery novella is genuinely different. Nicola Upson likes using real people as her detectives – she has a whole series where the detective is Josephine Tey (the ‘golden age’ writer whose detective at one point solves the Princes in the Tower), while here we get the designers of the game Cluedo (aka Clue in the US). Anthony and Elva Pratt apparently devised the game based on a hotel where they used to run murder mystery parties – but in the story a real visit to that hotel not only inspires the game, but involves a real murder.
The setting is Christmas 1943, with the inevitable deep snow – but after that, the plot is anything but predictable as a Christmas mystery with some excellent twists. If I’m honest, the story is unlikely in the extreme, but this doesn’t make what happens any less enjoyable. The husband and wife pair turn up to find the Tudor Close Hotel in Rottingdean distinctly run down from its heyday, when they regularly ran events there. But before they even get to the hotel, they discover that a murder has taken place.
Unlike a classic Christie-style group of people in a confined location, we don’t get a whole bunch of people who have reason to have committed the murder – in fact, because the initial crime doesn’t take place in the hotel, there is no reason to suspect anyone there, apart from some small details – but things in the hotel rapidly become worse. Initially the Pratts have to totally redesign their mystery as the expected actors are no longer coming – resulting in the seeds of what would become Cluedo – but very few things here are what they seem.
This is a book you can easily read in a single day – I wish I’d saved it for Christmas Eve – but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
You can buy The Christmas Clue from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com (audiobook) and Bookshop.org
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-christmas-clue-nicola-upson.html
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