The Voices of the Dead: A 1941 Mystery Featuring Josephine Tey

In 1941, Britain hid some of its most valuable paintings in a disused Welsh slate quarry. Nicola Upson starts with that real wartime operation in The Voices of the Dead, then gives the people working underground a discovery no one planned for. A roof collapses and exposes a woman’s grave, drawing crime novelist Josephine Tey into a mystery that reaches back about 40 years.

The Voices of the Dead is the 12th book in Upson’s Josephine Tey mystery series. Faber and Faber lists a November 5, 2026 UK publication date, and Crooked Lane Books lists November 10, 2026 for the U.S. hardcover, paperback and ebook.

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What is The Voices of the Dead about?

Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose is overseeing the move of National Gallery paintings into the slate workings of north Wales. Josephine is already in the area on holiday, as is playwright Noël Coward, who is preparing Blithe Spirit. Then the roof fall exposes the grave. Josephine starts asking locals about the woman, and a new death gives her questions an urgency that an old grave alone might never have had.

The quarry gives the story its sharpest idea. The paintings go underground because people want to keep them safe and bring them back someday. The grave comes to light by accident, decades after the woman was buried. Put those two events in the same place and the mystery has a question bigger than who was buried there. Who gets to decide what a community preserves and what it leaves buried?

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The true story behind the Welsh quarry

The National Gallery began evacuating its collection in September 1939, sending paintings to several temporary locations. On August 12, 1941, the first of the gallery’s pictures arrived at Manod Quarry near Blaenau Ffestiniog. The paintings stayed there for the duration of the war. The National Gallery archive traces the actual move, while Upson’s novel builds its investigation around the fictional discovery of the grave.

Coward’s play also belongs to the history of that summer. Blithe Spirit opened in Manchester in June 1941 before moving to London in July, with Margaret Rutherford playing the medium Madame Arcati. A play about summoning the dead is a fitting companion to a mystery in which the past resurfaces because a roof gives way. The two stories ask who gets heard when the dead can no longer speak for themselves.

Was Josephine Tey a real person?

Yes. Josephine Tey was a pen name of Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh, whose mysteries include The Daughter of Time. Upson makes a fictionalized version of Tey a sleuth in her own series. There’s a pleasing echo of Tey’s work in this premise. In The Daughter of Time, Inspector Alan Grant looks into the case against Richard III from a hospital bed. In Upson’s book, Tey herself has to ask what can still be learned about a death decades later.

Find Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time on Amazon

Where should you start with Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey books?

Start with An Expert in Murder if you want to meet Upson’s version of Tey at the beginning. If you’re drawn to the series by its wartime settings, Shot with Crimson is the previous book. It takes Tey to Hollywood in 1939, where Alfred Hitchcock is filming Rebecca. If it’s the Welsh quarry that caught your attention, The Voices of the Dead gives you a new investigation to follow. Starting there means meeting recurring characters well into their story.

For more Golden Age puzzles, see Books of Brilliance’s guide to classic murder mysteries.

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