Two for Sorrow

The last day of 2010 brings me to Nicola Upson's Two for Sorrow, an enjoyable crime novel which blends the execution of the Finchley baby farmers Amelia Sach and Annie Walters in 1903 with a fictional murder thirty years later. The two sets of events are bound together by the character of the novelist Josephine Tey, who has decided to write a fictionalised account of the Finchley case out of a combination of respect for her mentor and guilt at the death of Sach's daughter, whom Upson imagines might have studied at the same college as Tey. But when a woman is brutally killed ahead of a gala at Tey's club to raise money for the Royal College of Nursing, Josephine starts to worry that her attempt to dig up the past may be to blame.

The novel features three of Upson's established cast of characters: the Motley sisters, here drafted in to supply some of the dresses and sets for the gala evening, and Inspector Archie Penrose. And as well as featuring some more minor characters in returning roles, it also features appearance by Lydia Beaumont and her former girlfriend Marta Fox, both of whom were major characters in An Expert in Murder, in parts that assume a certain familiarity with the events of the previous novel and which might even be classed as spoilers for An Expert.

Of the rest of the cast, the characters of Celia Bannerman and Marjorie Baker are particularly strong. Bannerman, Tey's mentor when she studied at Anstey College in Birmingham, comes across as a strongly moral and rather authoritarian figure who has given up on happiness and contented herself with the administration of the Cowdray Club. Baker, meanwhile, is Bannerman's complete antithesis: a former criminal, determined to make a go of her job working as seamstress in the Motleys' studio, but never quite able to shake off her past when the opportunity for a quick buck presents itself.

As with Millbank Prison in Affinity, Holloway casts a long shadow over events. The book opens with an excerpt from Tey's account of the executions of Sach and Walters from the perspective of one of their warders, which emphasizes the way that the women were under the constant eye of the guards for the weeks leading up to their deaths. As the warder has it, she comes to know them better than she knows anyone else in her life. The prison also dominates events in the 1930s. Both Majorie Baker and her friend Lucy are former inmates of Holloway; Mary Size, Holloway's reforming deputy governor, in a member of the Cowdray Club; and Josephine, in an attempt to understand the events she's fictionalising, visits the prison and gets shown around by Cicely McCall, who, as Upson notes in her afterword, published a book about the prison in 1938.

As with the other novels in the series, Two for Sorrow is a polished novel that skillfully blends fact with fiction so well that the joins are invisible. The characters are well drawn and often non-hetronomative, the settings are excellent and the murders, when they occur, are appallingly gruesome.

Definitely recommended.