The Man in the Queue

Not my favorite Tey, but interesting. In reading the reviews, it seems that some editions of the novel use the word 'dago' in referring to the main suspect, and this racist term turned people off. Mine used the word 'Levantine' which is an indication of geographic origin (the Levant, which I think we would now consider the 'near East'). I don't know which term was used in the original British edition. Regardless, there's certainly an element of cultural smugness in the attitude of Inspector Grant (which I think is probably an accurate depiction of your average Englishman back when this book was written), and he makes a lot of assumptions based on the perceived origins of the victim and the suspects. Grant has nothing else to go on but show more cultural and class stereotypes, since initially there are no clues. So he falls into some pitfalls due to his own biases, and ultimately all his assumptions are proven to be wrong. There's a recurring theme of disguise and deception throughout the novel, including the police methodology. No one is who they seem, people are more complicated than their surface presentation, and even though the solution to the crime seems to come out of the blue, there were actually subtle clues planted in the narrative which were ignored by Grant because they didn't fit with his worldview. In fact, Grant couldn't have solved the crime because he was so caught up in his preconceived notions and ideas about motive. In the end, the motive of the murder was unguessable, because it was so personal to the killer.

There's a lot of irony here. Tey wrote a number of stories with Grant as the protagonist, and it's hard to know what her intentions were, if the dramatic irony was purposeful and she was making a deliberate statement about social attitudes or if that's an artifact that appears due to modern sensibilities. In any case, although the narrative is flawed, it's a different type of story than your typical 'murder in a country house' and so I found it interesting. show less

That this was a debut mystery shows through a little in some less-than-perfect pacing and a slightly odd storytelling viewpoint. but that is more than made up for by the vivid descriptions of 1920's London, especially its theatreland and by the introduction of a strongly-drawn main character, Inspector Alan Grant. The plot is a little improbable and the solution is clumsy by the people and places feel real,

The book gets off to a slightly sluggish start, ameliorated by atmospheric descriptions of the rituals and entertainments associated with the process of patiently queuing in the rain in hope of gaining a theatre seat.

The scenes in the theatre, both when Grant meets the star of the show in her dressing room and then sees beyond her show more glamour in her final performance hum with life and lift the book.

The premise, an unknown man stabbed in a theatre queue by an unknown assailant, gives Grant the double challenge of identifying both parties. The manhunt that follows is methodical and sometimes ingenious but I didn't find it engaging. Almost halfway through, something happened that twisted my understanding of what was going on and the story moved from relentless manhunt to something more complicated and whole new set of possibilities opened up.

The ending, although plausible, was clumsily handled by comparison to the rest of the plot and left me dissatisfied.

The main thing I took away from the book was Tey's ability to bring people and places alive. Her main focus was Inspector Alan Grant, who appeared in six of her mystery books. I found that, the longer the book went on, the more I understood him and the less I liked him.

Grant is a charming but emotionally distant introvert who assess the world from behind an extrovert's smile. He has the easy social grace of a man who went to the right schools, served as an officer in World War I and survived and who is financially independent. He lives alone. He appears to have no close friends and no lovers. He seems comfortable in his isolation, which he appears to experience as freedom.

Grant is seen by his colleagues and superiors at Scotland Yard as having 'flair'. This is something closely associated with imagination and therefore suspect if used too often but Grant's charming, self-deprecating style convinces people to trust him. This surprised me as Grant's first instinct, in most cases, is to lie to get what he wants. He's almost pathologically incapable of a straightforward approach Even when he sets out to arrest a man and has a warrant in his pocket, he relies on subterfuge rather than just serving the warrant and making the arrest. He picks subordinates who share his talent for trickery and lies and he and they default to covert methods of investigation. Yet Grant's public face is one of firm-but-fair open-minded rectitude.

It seems to me that the real Grant is what he refers to as 'his watcher' who always sit back and assesses people and situations dispassionately. This 'watcher' is not passive. Grant is an ambush predator. His watcher is always scenting for prey and looking for ambush points.

I had the same experience watching Grant that he had when watching the charismatic actress' final performance. I saw past the glamour to the clever predator hiding in the shadows.

I was perhaps helped in this by the fact that Grant is a man of times and class. His judgements are based on crude stereotypes about race and class that mean the world he sees is not really what's in front of him. He suspects the foreigner and constantly refers to the suspect, even after he knows his name, as 'the Dago'. He under-estimates women and is completely unconscious of his own privilege.

Of course, Grant as privileged English predator may have been exactly what Tey intended me to see. My dislike of Grant is a sign of how strongly drawn he is. I'll read the next book in the series just to see what happens to him. show less

I read this many years ago, along with Tey's other Alan Grant books, and remember loving it. But this reread showed all the faults. Stereotypes and prejudices abound, Grant overtly dismisses many cues, fails to reinterview interested parties, and misreads many clues. I knew way before the end who was really pertinent to the murder, and only couldn't put my finder on the doer because the person in question was so 'disguised' as harmless.

If I'd read this today for the first time, I wouldn't have bothered with the following books, and missed [The Daughter of Time], which I remember quite fondly. But I don't think it worthwhile to reread the series unless I'm caught in a snowstorm with only old mysteries on the shelf.

Josephine Tey is one of my favorite authors, easily the equal of Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. Sadly, she wrote only eight mystery novels. I find half of those eight (Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair, Brat Farrar and The Daughter of Time) absolutely brilliant and another (To Love and Be Wise) very, very good indeed. Unfortunately, I find Man in the Queue, her first novel, merely good.

Which doesn't mean it isn't worth reading. I was struck at the start at just how strong is Tey's prose, as she describes a queue of people waiting to buy tickets for a London musical comedy. When the line moves forward, a man keels over, a stiletto in his back, and the seven people near him are detained by the police but all of them claim to show more have witnessed nothing. As it turns out, the corpse has nothing to identify him, so the first order of business is finding out just who was the man in the queue.

Investigating is Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, and he's a rather bland figure in this novel. Likable, but he doesn't have the quirks or emotional complexities or flashy brilliance that mark out a Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey from the start. There are also ethnic stereotypes expressed by Grant in this novel, no question. The introduction by Robert Barnard that appears in new editions of the Tey novels, even accuses Tey of being anti-semitic and anti-working class. I don't see that in my reread of four of the Tey novels so far, and don't remember it in the ones I haven't read for decades. However, I'd say there's a difference between a novel or its author being bigoted, and the characters expressing prejudice. And I'd note that Grant's assumptions based on such stereotypes prove wrong.

There are other flaws. Towards the end traces of first person appear out of the blue, as if there was originally a frame that was dropped but a few "I" statements got missed being edited out. I think the main complaint veteran mystery readers will have is that Tey doesn't play fair and allow you to solve the mystery along with her detective. The resolution, although it doesn't conflict with what we've known and makes sense of the complexities of the case, does come out of the blue. I still enjoyed this--Tey is always a pleasure to read. And if I don't rate this higher, that's because her first novel really just doesn't match her best. She's one who got stronger as she went along. But that just means that if you start here, you only have better to look forward to. show less

‘Yes,’ she said; ‘that’s all very well, but look at the long night there’ll be. You never know the minute you’ll waken up hungry and be glad of the sandwiches even if it’s only to pass the time. They’re chicken, and you don’t know when you’ll have chicken again. It’s a terribly poor country, Scotland. Goodness only knows what you’ll get to eat!’
Grant said that Scotland nowadays was very like the rest of Britain, only more beautiful.
‘I don’t know anything about beauty,’ said Mrs Field, putting the sandwiches resolutely away in the rug-strap, ‘but I do know that a cousin of mine was in service there once – she went for the season with her people from London – and there wasn’t a house to be seen in show more the whole countryside but their own, and not a tree. And the natives had never heard of teacakes, and called scones “skons.”’
‘How barbaric!’ said Grant, folding his most ancient tweed lovingly away in his case.

The Man in the Queue is Tey's first book in the Inspector Grant series and deals with the mystery of a murder that occurs in plain sight but has no witnesses. This is not a spoiler as such as this literally happens within the first few pages.

From there on we are introduced to Scotland Yard's Alan Grant, who is the Inspector investigating the case. Grant is a great character - he is funny, contemplative, but also does not shirk away from action.

Some of the funniest parts of this story are build around the dialogue that Grant has with various other characters. And the best part is that they are meant to be funny. They are not just funny because they are quaint - there is some freshness to the dialogues.
‘No time is wasted that earns such a wealth of gratitude as I feel for you,’ said Struwwelpeter. ‘I was in the depths when you arrived. I can never paint on Monday mornings. There should be no such thing. Monday mornings should be burnt out of the calendar with prussic acid. And you have made a Monday morning actually memorable! It is a great achievement. Sometime when you are not too busy breaking the law come back and I’ll paint your portrait. You have a charming head.’
Of course, this should not come as a surprise when we know that before writing this book, Tey had already become a successful writer of plays and other stories under her pseudonym of Gordon Daviot. But it was a bit of a surprise to me, because quite a few reviews of The Man in the Queue did mention that the book had not aged well, a criticism which also seems to be linked with the use of the slur "Dago" throughout the book.

I can of course understand that criticism. However, having read two of her other novels in this series also, I am beginning to wonder whether Tey's use of satire and irony may have been at play here, too. She uses the term "Dago" so abundantly to refer to main suspect that I began to wonder whether this over-use was intended to show the assumptions that Tey may have suspected her readers at the time to make as being blinded by stereotype rather than the analysis of the facts.

There are some other parts in the book that lead me to believe that Tey may actually have tried to dispel some of the stereotypes found in the pulp fiction of her time. (And of course, in her most famous work A Daughter of Time, we get to question again whether appearances really tell us anything about facts at all!)

Notably, Tey includes a dinner conversation in which she shows up a character who is a racist as an ignorant bigot:
"His race was a fetish with him, and he compared it at length with most of the other nations in Western Europe, to their extreme detriment. It was only towards the end of tea that Grant found, to his intense amusement, that Mr Logan had never been out of Scotland in his life. The despised Lowlanders he had met only during his training for the ministry some thirty years ago, and the other nations he had never known at all."
I have no biographical proof for this notion of mine. Tey was a private person. Even Josephine Tey is a nom de plume. However, I am looking forward to finding out more about Tey and see whether I can put some meat on this bone in the course of reading more by and about her.

As for The Man in the Queue, it is not a great mystery - which is another reason I am inclined to believe that Tey's interest lay more with the creation of ambiguity than with a plot that would thrill lovers of puzzles. There are no clues that would lead the reader to the ultimate solution of the murder. In fact, the ending and solution comes quite out of the blue. In that sense, I would even say that it might work as a mockery of the detective genre. (Maybe that is the reason why it took another 7 years for the next book in the series? I have no answers.)

Still I found it very much worth reading.
"Well, he would find out from the Yard if there was anything new, and if not, he would fortify himself with tea. He needed it. And the slow sipping of tea conduced to thought. Not the painful tabulations of Barker, that prince of superintendents, but the speculative revolving of things which he, Grant, found more productive. He numbered among his acquaintances a poet and essayist, who sipped tea in a steady monotonous rhythm, the while he brought to birth his masterpieces. His digestive system was in a shocking condition, but he had a very fine reputation among the more precious of the modern littérateurs." show less

Tey was a fantastic writer, and her mystery novels are peppered with beautiful set-pieces, elegant descriptions and minor characters sketched with scythe-like precision. Her concept of the investigator who often makes mistakes and has to recalibrate is also fantastic, and the novel inadvertently has become a piece of historical writing: it's thoroughly enjoyable to keep reminding oneself that Grant can't just use a mobile phone, or look up a suspect's address in "the system". Very engaging.

I will say the ending is rather abrupt, in contradistinction to the sometimes languid, well-paced rest of the novel. And, to be frank, Tey doesn't do a good job of hiding a major clue which - annoyingly - Grant doesn't seem to pick up! The clue show more doesn't reveal the killer, but it certainly points an arrow in a general direction. I hope that Tey meant for us to pick up on things that Grant doesn't, but I'm not so sure in this particular interest.

But anyhow, she's great, and all of her books are worth reading on their own merits. show less

On the plus side, the writing is descriptive and sometimes lovely, both of which are surprising in a detective story. For instance, Inspector Grant sees laundry hanging to dry in a poor neighborhood: “Here and there a line of gay, motley child’s clothes danced and ballooned with the breeze in a necklace of coloured laughter.”

On the minus side, it’s rather dated in its social attitudes. Just by seeing the murder weapon, Inspector Grant draws this conclusion: “This was a crime that had been planned with an ingenuity and executed with a subtlety that was foreign to an Englishman’s habit of thought. The very femininity of it proclaimed the Levant, or at the very least one used to Levantine habits of life.”

On the plus side show more again, it’s a clever and engaging story, if one makes allowances for the ways it’s dated, and it is a colorful depiction of a time and place. Looking up some of the obsolete colloquialisms was part of the fun. show less