British · b. 1970
Nicola Upson is a British crime writer and biographer. She was born in Suffolk, studied English at Cambridge, and worked as a theatre director and writer before turning to fiction. She is best known for a series of historical mystery novels that use the real Golden Age author Josephine Tey as the detective. The series began with An Expert in Murder in 2008 and continued through novels such as Angel with Two Faces, Two for Sorrow, Fear in the Sunlight and Nine Lessons. Each book places Tey in a real setting of the 1930s or 1940s, often tied to the theatre or to a historical event. Upson has also written a study of Tey's life and work, and she has edited collections of crime fiction. Her novella The Christmas Clue, published by Faber in 2025, imagines the origins of the board game Cluedo. She is valued for combining fair-play puzzles with period detail and an interest in the lives of women writers.