After a long absence, Alan Grant returns to my life. (Which is a different way of saying "I haven't read this in a long time".) It's obvious that Josephine Tey didn't originally intend to write mystery novels: not to in any way belittle mystery novels, which I love, but there is an intelligent uniqueness to her story and her writing that is a pure joy, an approach to the task which is fresh and unique. Alan Grant (whom I cannot call by his last name, and therefore with whom I will probably become a bit familiar as I talk about these books; hopefully he wouldn't mind me calling him Alan) is … lovely. A friend noted in her recent review of a different edition that she was made a bit uneasy by the oft-repeated word "dago". I decided to read this on the spur of the moment, and a little ways in remembered that part of the discussion that followed her review, and was a little surprised that I had not encountered the epithet. Before long, Alan Grant dubs the mysterious suspect "the Levantine" – and a minute later I started wondering if that was where "dago" used to be; I questioned it because it didn't seem to mean the same thing. By the time I finished the book and realized that "dago" had never appeared, it was clear that at some point a more politically correct edit had taken place. Unfortunately the edit was more politically than typographically correct – there were a number of spelling errors. It also wasn't terribly correct topographically, as the Levant consists of "The countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to Egypt", which I think would be a much different sort of complexion than the descriptions of our lad imply. It's a lovely, gorgeously written story, this, and I'm glad that the casual racism of another time has been erased (though I'm interested in the mechanics of that). It isn't so much a Whodunnit, in which the reader can follow along and figure out who the killer is – I'm fairly sure that's impossible, as the story is written. But it is a terrific Howdunnit, as well as a terrific Howsolvdit – a portrait of a very good and unique detective doggedly following up any thread to find answers to who had the opportunity (and means, and motive) to stab The Man in the Queue. It's a psychological study, in a way – how people (or at least 1920's Londoners) can be standing in line in front of or behind or nearby someone who is murdered, and never see a thing; the mindset of a very intelligent detective relentlessly hunting his suspect, and how that changes when the suspect become a man to him; the mindset of the hunted man, whose friend is dead, whether he was the one who killed him or not. I can't think of another detective – perhaps not even another fictional character – quite like Alan Grant. He is thoughtful, insightful, brilliant, and could have been anything – and has chosen to take his "flair" into the field of homicide investigation. It's not quite fair to the poor killers (which is as it should be). His thought processes are clearly illustrated, and it's a pleasure to follow them. It's also a pleasure that, while he's clearly more intelligent than his colleagues, they aren't idiots – the police are uniformly (pardon the pun) depicted as sharp and hard-working. Nice for a change. (Reading "Ray Marcable" did not make an impact for a chapter or so, and then I let it sound in my head – and groaned. She wouldn't … Oh. She would. But surely the British Theatah wouldn't / didn't…? I mean, that's just awful.)
I expected to like this a lot. Golden Age crime fiction, I'm pretty sure my mother mentioned liking it, etc, etc. But I couldn't get past the endless racism, and the general feeling that Josephine Tey would be a men's rights activist now. I mean, a woman on the stage overshadows her male co-stars, and yet the whole tone is not, wow, her skill and grace and so on, but that she is secretly a conniving bitch. The whole story serves to hammer home that she's a woman who only cares about herself -- with very little actual evidence, which is funny coming from a detective story. Someone else summarised it really well, and I can only quote (warning, spoilers):So, someone who wants to kill a woman because he can't have her is sane. Someone who wants to kill a man to save her daughter's life is crazy. Very, very interesting, Tey. And at the end we're asked teasingly whether there's a villain in the story. I strongly suspect the villain we're meant to think of is the woman the murder victim was going to kill. If she'd been nicer, she'd have appreciated that nice young man, you see, and none of this trouble would have happened. (From Leonie's review on Goodreads)The description and so on can be as clever as it likes, but I couldn't stand one more slighting reference to "the Dago", or commentary about the "un-English crime", or any of that. And the mystery itself... it's obvious from the length of the book that the inspector is after the wrong man. It's obvious from the way the man and the people around him act, too. The only excuse for going along with the thin, motiveless explanation Grant dredges up is if you've got a prejudice to begin with and you're going to stick to your theory no matter what -- no matter how Tey makes a song and dance about Grant being bothered by the case. The reason Grant is wrong, well, at least you can't blame him there. There's virtually no clue, and nothing tied specifically to any suspect other than the red herring one. You can't guess it directly from the information given -- not a hope. I sound really scathing, but that's in part because I hoped I'd really enjoy this. I read it pretty much in one go: the narration is pretty compulsive, and the narrative voice is an interesting choice too. But the pretty sentences didn't save it from how bothered I was with the outdated stuff (reliance on reading people's faces, reliance on "national characters", etc). Now I've gone looking at reviews, I can see other people who didn't think much of this one did like her later work, so I might still be along for the ride there if I can get it from the library.Originally posted here.
What do You think about The Man In The Queue (1995)?
By the standards of a Josephine Tey novel, The Man in the Queue is rather amateurish. (To be fair, it was the first novel Elizabeth Mackintosh wrote.) There is a noticeable strain to make sure that every gun of Chekhov's goes off (or at least is planned to): every loose end is tied up, every subplot wraps up neatly in the order it was introduced, and there's a nice little bow on top. It's difficult to discuss without giving away the plot, but suffice to say that the actual murder could have been told in ten pages without straining.Tey's language is fussier and more ornamented than it would later become, but she does produce some really spectacular images along the way. Her admiration for Inspector Alan Grant here often feels delivered with a bit of a smirk, as this perfect man finds just about every way to get things wrong until things are nearly too late. Even in this first attempt, she manages to capture real human interactions and relationships that I recognize from life even as I realize that I never took note of them.The cultural prejudices of the early twentieth century are hard to read. Mackintosh, writing not as Josephine Tey but as the man Gordon Daviot, endorses some very questionable prejudices about women. (And takes a great deal of delight in knocking almost every one down.) There are a number of prejudices about dark-skinned peoples (like Italians and Welshmen) on display, but they're parodied and undermined at every turn, and I don't take them as sincere. The legitimate charges of classism leveled at Tey are not really supported by this book (but don't worry she'll get to that later).To call the ending anticlimactic is to understate the matter, but it's not awful. In a delightful moment, the narrator breaks the fourth wall for the third time in the book in the final paragraphs to deliver a final question to the reader that makes an ideal epigram to the entire Tey canon: "Well, is there?*" And the curtain rises...Don't read this novel first. But after you've run out of her numerous first-rate novels, it's an interesting early work by one of the most underappreciated writers of her century.* If you read any other Tey work you may be able to guess what this question is about.
—Jonathan
What an intriguing, engrossing mystery. It had a bit of a slow start, and I have to drop a star for the hero - Grant - who is the least interesting character in this oddly elaborate tale. I suppose that's part of the point, to create a bit of a blank slate who can adapt to his circumstances and shine the spotlight where needed. The cast of characters is otherwise full of quirky, hilarious, off-beat Dickensian personalities. They're delightful to meet, and some of my favorite parts of the book happened in brief one-off exchanges with characters who are unlikely to appear in future Inspector Grant novels.This means, among other effects, that my sympathies transferred rather quickly to the criminal the inspector spent most of the book doggedly hunting down. Grant, too, was rather more of a misogynist than I would have expected from the pen of such a clever female author. He frequently makes assumptions based on ideas of widespread female hysteria and is completely baffled when women defy his expectations. Again - this must be an intentional choice in developing his character, since so much of the story was focused on setting up a traditional detective story and then neatly turning all the assumptions on their head.It's a brilliant story, in a lot of ways, and perhaps four stars is selling it a little too short. I suppose I'm mostly concerned that Grant won't be an interesting enough personality to carry the other books once the initial shine has worn off (although I do intend to give them a try). This one, though, is worth a longer, spoiler-filled analysis - with a particular focus on how one defines "heroes" and "villains" - that I may indulge in at some point.On the purely literary level, this was a beautifully written love letter to England (while being slyly critical of it in many respects). The descriptions - largely of landscape and shifting weather - made me long to go back. It's the type of book that made me fall in love with the country as I was growing up, and it pulls up such fond memories from my too-brief periods traveling through Scotland and England. I'm glad, as a lover of both excellent mystery writing and of the country as a whole, to have this book on my shelf.
—Katrina
I've nothing really to say about this except to describe the entire plot which I do not feel like doing and which I will probably forget in about a week anyway. A man is murdered in a queue, but no one knows who he is which makes it hard to determine why he was murdered. Red herrings abound and the resolution is completely whackadoodle but it was pretty entertaining. Apparently, I had the cleaned up version that removed outright slurs but still maintained its racist and classist charm (ex. stabbing is so un-English! Guess we should look for a hot-blooded, swarthy Latin! Or a poor person).
—Amy
