So the other day, I was standing in front of my bookcases the way you might stand in front of an open refrigerator, trying to figure out what to read next. You look at each thing in the fridge, momentarily imagine yourself tasting that, and then turn away to the next thing.

What I wanted, I finally decided, was to read that mystery, the one about the guy who gets murdered while he’s lined up for something in London. What was that book…? I had a vague feeling that maybe it was by… Josephine Tey? That meant pulling the front row of books off the bottom shelf of one of the bedroom bookshelves and, yes, there it was. Success!

This is Tey’s first book, which isn’t surprising. Written in 1929, it’s a little awkward, and why Detective Grant – who goes on to become a favorite detective – insists on referring to his prime suspect as “The Levantine”, when the guy turns out to be English through and through with an Italian great-grandmother or something, I don’t know. I think she was trying to sound sophisticated or something. Ridiculous. But here’s what saves the book.

This isn’t the only thing Inspector Grant is wrong about.

Already established at Scotland Yard as a talented detective, on a casually comfortable relationship with the Assistant Commissioner, well-tailored and well-heeled, respected by his men, and recognized by the public owing to the frequent featuring of his photograph in the papers, Allen is no rookie. When a man is killed in a queue of theatre-goers waiting to get into a final weeks performance of the hottest musical of the season, his boss assigns him to take over for the overworked local precinct and the two of them treat the assignment casually, Grant will probably knock it off in no time.

Grant views the body, interviews the witnesses and deduces: clearly a victim of gang violence.

And he’s wrong.

He pulls in a pin-striped gang leader and takes him to view the body. The guy remembers meeting the victim on a train on the way to a horse race. It turns out the victim is a bookie but apparently bookie, at the time, was a respected job?

Grant forms a new theory.

That one is wrong, too.

Throughout the book, Grant keeps coming up with new theories – and he keeps being wrong. Even when he arrests a suspect, a man he has pursued from London to a rural Scottish manse, his spidey sense is tingling. He knows he’s got it wrong. He digs further, finds another clue, follows it to it’s logical conclusion, and…

Is wrong again!

It isn’t until the wrong suspect is brought up for trial that the true murderer comes forward and – it’s someone that nobody suspected, but the reasons make sense and, it turns out, were foreshadowed at the start of and throughout the book.

This may sound annoying but it’s actually very well done. It must have taken a lot of courage for Tey to take her handsome, sophisticated detective (so much like every other golden age detective), have him follow his nose (just like Poirot or Whimsey or any other golden age detective) – and then have him be so thuddingly wrong at every step of the way.

And yet, she does it so beautifully, that Grant lives on and goes on to star in another eight books. All of the elements are here: Grant’s obsession with fishing, his shoulder-rubbing with stage stars, his friendly relationship with his domestic help, his obsession with faces, and his strongly intuitive way of pursuing criminals. All of this blossoms in her future volumes, including her most famous, The Daughter of Time¹.

But here’s my problem:

This wasn’t the book I was thinking of.

Somewhere, lurking about in my collection is another book about people in London lined up, where someone waiting gets murdered. Maybe it was by Marian Babson – I have a vague feeling that it included inner monologues from the various characters waiting in line, and Marian Babson is the queen of inner monologues from various characters. But maybe it was Robert Barnard, although why Barnard would write a mystery set in, of all places, a London department store queue, I have no idea. That doesn’t sound like him.

Moral of today’s story: don’t line up for things in London. Apparently it’s not safe.

1. Post, coming soon. ↩︎