Nicola Upson on her novel Shot With Crimson: ‘I was inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Cambridgeshire secret’

If last night you dreamt of going to Manderley again, this latest historical mystery by Cambridge crime writer Nicola Upson will scratch that itch..

The story centres on the Hollywood filming of Daphne du Maurier’s book Rebecca, by Alfred Hitchcock, just as war is looming in 1939.

But it starts more than 20 years earlier at the real-life Cambridgeshire stately home that inspired Manderley, the house that takes on such a huge presence in Rebecca.

Shot With Crimson by Nicola Upson begins as 10-year-old Daphne du Maurier is visiting Milton Hall, near Peterborough, in 1917 as it was being run as a hospital for soldiers returning from the First World War.

It is the 11th book in Nicola’s historical crime series starring a fictional version of Josephine Tey, a real-life Golden Age mystery writer.

Nicola says: “A lot of things fell into place with this book. I was writing it towards the end of lockdown when travel restrictions were still going on and although I knew I wanted to set it in Hollywood, I couldn’t go there for research.

“The thrust of the book is Hitchcock's filming of Rebecca and I'd been looking forward to doing that book for ages because Hitchcock appeared in one of my earlier books as he actually - in real life - did film one of Josephine Tey’s books. Her novel A Shilling for Candles was turned into his film Young and Innocent, just before he left Britain in 1937. So I always knew that I'd want to go back to Hitchcock and show a different side of him. His first film in America was Rebecca and the timing worked with the beginning of the war, so obviously it was the one for me to do. But Covid struck again, making travel impossible.

“And, of course, I realised I couldn’t have the murder mystery happen on the film set, because you can't rewrite history to the extent that Joan Fontaine did it, or Laurence Olivier is bumped off in the film in the scenes in Monte Carlo.

“That’s when my partner Mandy suggested that a part of the story should take place in England. It seems obvious now, as all the best ideas do, and that really opened up the possibilities for the book.”

Then Nicola discovered the Cambridgeshire connection with Daphne du Maurier, who wrote the book that Hitchcock’s film was based on.

“I'd always thought Manderley was based on Menabilly in Cornwall because it’s a house that obsessed her for most of her life and she was so rooted in Cornwall,” says Nicola. “But it turns out, as these wonderful quirks of fate do, that her earliest inspiration for Manderley was Milton Hall just outside Peterborough, which of course was amazing for us in this neck of the woods. And she went there when she was a little girl at the very end of the First World War, when the hospital when the whole had been requisitioned as a military hospital.

“She referred to the house as dear old Milton. And in an interview years later her son said she had met the housekeeper there, which made me wonder if she had been an inspiration for Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper in Rebecca. So when you discover something like that, it can trigger your imagination.”

But the hall is only one part of the story, which stretches across the Atlantic. This time we find Josephine sailing to America on the lavish Queen Mary liner - just as the world is on the brink of war again.

She is heading to meet up with her partner, Marta, who is working in Hollywood for Alfred Hitchcock on the set of du Maurier’s Rebecca, and we discover a very different side to the legendary director from his public persona.

“That's the other part of the book, really, the soap opera of the filming of Rebecca and Hitchcock's war with the producer David Selznick.

Obviously, there are so many different Alfred Hitchcocks and every biographer has a different take on him. But there are lots of things we think we know about him: his somewhat cruel sense of humour, his not always very respectful treatment of his actors, in particular his female leads, his obsession with blondes.

“It was the family side of him that I wanted to show. The man who was married to a woman who also worked in film, Alma Reville who was senior in film to him when he first started, and who did every role pretty much apart from starring and directing. She had a huge creative input with him. And it was a real partnership. So when we talk about Hitchcock film, it's that partnership and when he got his lifetime achievement award, he thanked four people, and they were all Alma Reville. I wanted to show the respect he had for her and him as a family man, and when they moved to America, their biggest concern was that their daughter Patricia would be happy and settle there and that it would be an adventure for the three of them. So their priorities were not necessarily the film contracts.”

The mystery begins when a shocking act of violence reawakens the shadows of the past, with consequences on both sides of the Atlantic, Josephine and her police officer friend DCI Archie Penrose find themselves on a trail leading back to the house that inspired a young Daphne du Maurier.

When it came to finally writing a scene with the adult du Maurier, Nicola was ready.

She says: “There's a brilliant biography of her by Margaret Forrester, which was really useful. But also I just read her work and some of her letters until I felt confident enough to sit down and channel Daphne du Maurier. But I felt actually, very strongly that because of the way Rebecca was written, there had to be a first person voice in the story. I toyed with the idea of writing the whole book as Josephine in the first person, because I've never done that. But it felt a bit artificial. It didn't feel natural. And then obviously, as the book evolved, it became obvious that I should be Daphne du Maurier at the beginning and the ending of the book.”

Shot With Crimson by Nicola Upson is published by Faber, priced £16.99.