I have just enjoyed listening to the audio book. There were plenty of "red herrings' and interesting twists, and I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of Scottish rural life in the 1920s. Grant is a likeable, complex and cerebral detective. There was some unfortunate racial stereotyping, which would not get past an editor today. The shock I felt on hearing it was a good indication of how community standards have improved since the book was written eighty years ago. ( )

This is Tey's first detective story, and it's excellent. There are a couple odd things - what appear to me to be errors in British society, which seems very odd - isn't Tey British? Grant thinks casually (not happily, but casually) of confronting a criminal gun-to-gun. Are the CID normally armed? It's rather a major point in a lot of the mysteries I read that American police are armed and British are not. Similarly, Grant's housekeeper bemoans the Scots pronunciation of 'scone' as 'skon', which I think is the way it's pronounced in England too. Oh, and a woman is described as being 'Scotch' rather than Scots - all the kind of errors Americans tend to make about Britain (I've made them and had them corrected, and seen them being corrected in others, many times). Those aside, an interesting story - I had read it before and had some clue as to the outcome, though I had completely forgotten who the murderer actually was. Ratcliff was a complex blind alley - well, so was most of the evidence and suspicion in the whole case. Solved by an unsolicited confession - sheesh! Though Grant did know something was wrong with it, though he was completely stopped on what - in fact, that chapter is probably the most eloquent expression of total frustration I have ever read. Overall. a good story - definitely not one of my favorites, but worth reading and rereading. ( )

There are some interesting subtexts in this story of love, obsession and murder. A man in a queue for the final performance of a particular actress in this run of her play before she goes to the US falls over dead and no-one remembers him being murdered. Inspector Alan Grant has to uncover the clues and follow a few red herrings before discovering the truth.

It's full of details that to today's sensibilities are not too correct but it's an interesting look into the life and times and methods. It hasn't aged quite as well as some of her contemporaries and as other commentors have said the ending is a bit of a let-down, but in some ways quite realistic. ( )

This was the first Alan Grant mystery (Elizabeth MacKintosh's first book, 1929) which she originally published under her other pseudonym, Gordon Daviot. The first novel under the Josephine Tey pseudonym was A Shilling for Candles (1936), also an Alan Grant novel. The other Alan Gran novels were To Love and Be Wise 1950, The Daughter of Time (1951), and The Singing Sands (1952). Also as Josephine Tey she wrote Miss Pym Disposes (1947), The Franchise Affair (1949), and Brat Farrar (1949). She died in London on February 13, 1952. Tey was a master at writing mysteries that contained ingenious puzzles but also equally interesting characters. She was more like Dorothy Sayers than Agatha Christie in that her books were novels that contained mysteries. My favorite Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, also falls into this category. It is curious that Alan Grant, like Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn, did not need his salary as a policeman to earn his living as he had a considerable inheritance that would have sufficed for his needs. They both seem to be "gentlemen detectives", but unlike Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter they were employed by the police.

This first mystery has an ingenious puzzle involving a death by stabbing that happens in the line of people clamoring to get tickets for the final performance of a famous actress who is leaving to go to America the next day. The characters are interesting the clues are very well hidden. Even in this first effort you can see why Tey was considered one of the queens of the Golden Age of detective fiction. ( )

Only in Britain could you create a murder mystery that revolves around queuing. I adore Tey’s "The Daughter of Time," but I’d never read any other books by her. This is her first novel (originally published under a male pseudonym; ‘Tey’ is actually a pseudonym, too) and it introduces Alan Grant, who’s the detective in "Daughter of Time," too. He’s an enjoyable, if not especially vivid character to me—"Time" is fantastic because of its plot, which involves an investigation of whether Richard III was framed—but here, where the plot is less solid, the fact that Grant is (to make the obvious comparison) no Peter Wimsey is especially and unfortunately apparent. The ending was additionally disappointing—an unprompted confession? Lame! All in all, while this was a light, quick read, it was not an especially memorable one.