The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey

Protagonist: Insp. Alan Grant
Setting: Scotland Highlands, Hebrides Islands and London
Rating: 4.7

Insp. Alan Grant is on sick leave from Scotland Yard and on a train to the Scottish Highlands when a man is found dead. No concern of his -- he is on vacation -- so Grant goes on his way. But he has unwittingly picked up and taken the man’s newspaper with him. He finds a scrawled verse --"the singing sands, that guard the way to paradise" -- on a newspaper page, and those mysterious words draw him into the man’s death. Police claim he is a Frenchman who died accidentally, but Grant can’t help but believe that he is an Englishman -- because of the scratched verse -- and that his death may not have been accidental, even though he has no proof of such a thing.

This is a very introspective novel with Grant at the center, and with the mystery not even taking hold until halfway through the book. But I love Tey, and I especially loved this novel, with its slow unrevealing of the mystery. In a little over 200 pages, Grant moves from the Scottish Highlands to the Hebrides Islands to London, and we get a greater sense of who he is. Sadly, Tey died young, in her early 50s, and this is the last of her mysteries.

To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

Protagonist: Alan Grant
Setting: London
Rating: 4.0
Taken from a Francis Bacon quote -- It is impossible to love and to be wise -- Tey spins a story about love and its consequences. Scotland Yard’s Insp. Grant is called in when American photographer Leslie Searle goes missing and is presumed drowned.

Grant is asked to quietly question those with whom Searle had been spending time in the English countryside, among them radio commentator Walter Whitmore, who had been on a camping/boating trip with Searle when he went missing. Searle also had been spending quite a lot of time with Whitmore’s fiancee, and the two were seen arguing just before Searle’s disappearance. Grant doesn’t think Whitmore capable of killing Searle, but he also finds it difficult to call it an accidental drowning.

This is not the strongest Tey book, but it was still very enjoyable, with a twist ending I liked.

The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey

Protagonist: Insp. Alan Grant
Setting: London
Rating: 4.1

When a friend sent me a box full of books late last year, I knew what my series read would be this year: Josephine Tey, who many consider one of the best crime novelists, although her books are not as popular as others Golden Age writers, such as Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers.

To that end, I started with The Man in the Queue, her first, published in 1929. In the novel, a man is stabbed and killed in a line of people waiting to get into a popular show. No one saw him stabbed and, at first, no one claims to have even noticed the man waiting in line. Scotland Yard's Alan Grant painstakingly puts together a case, going from London to Scotland in pursuit of his suspect. But this not the usual whodunnit, or even a police procedural (although it reads like one). In fact, Tey disregarded the mystery conventions, according to mystery novelist Robert Barnard. "They all have crime at their heart," he notes, "but they are as far as possible from the 'body in the library' formula." That's so with this book, which gives us a nice surprise at the end.

This is Tey's first book, but the writing is already magnificent, such as this description of late-night London: “The midnight streets of London -- always so much more beautiful than the choppy crowded ones of the daytime -- fascinated him. At noon London made you a present of an entertainment, rich and varied and amusing. But at midnight she made you a present of herself; at midnight you could hear her breathe.” Or there's this phrase describing a waiter: “A new arrival took the table opposite, and Marcel, the geniality gone from his face like snowflakes on a wet pavement, went to listen to his needs with that mixture of tolerant superciliousness and godlike abstraction which he used to all but his five favourites.”

With writing like this, I can't wait to dip back into my Tey stash!