Few people got out of tipping the sour-faced attendant on the London to Scotland railway line, but the man in compartment B7 did. But Inspector Grant recognizes why before the attendant does:
"Can't you recognize a dead man when you see one?" he said.
Josephine Tey was the pen name of the Scottish writer Elizabeth MacKintosh, who also wrote acclaimed plays such as Richard of Bordeaux ,under the pen name Gordon Daviot.
In 1929 MacKintosh entered a detective novel -- The Man In The Queue -- into a competition, but it was another seven years before she would publish a follow-up, A Shilling for Candles. Both featured the gentlemanly detective, Inspector Grant, who cropped up in all but one of her books (and the one in which he does not is linked by another character).
But it was not until after the Second World War that Tey began to publish -- in all too brief flowering -- a half dozen of the finest crime novels of that period.
Miss Pym Disposes, which was is set in a girl's school, and -- as outlined in Cat Among the Pigeons -- almost certainly influenced Agatha Christie, was followed by The Franchise Affair, the re-telling of an eigteenth century cause celebre, by Brat Farrar, the story of a young man who takes part in a swindle, and suddenly finds himself the champion of the missing heir that he is impersonating against his victim's conceited twin brother.
Those three stand-alone novels were followed by three more featuring Inspector Grant: To Love and Be Wise, The Daughter of Time, featuring the Inspector convalescing and out of sheer boredom investigating an historical mystery in what is considered to one of the first such books of it's kind, and still amongst the finest.
And finally, The Singing Sands, published soon after her death in February 1952, sees Inspector Grant on leave and recuperating from stress induced by overwork. On holiday, he returns to Tey's beloved Scotland to stay with Cousin Laura, and for a while thinks of leaving the police and settling down with her, in a romantic sub-plot whose resolution has echoes in P.D. James' Unnatural Causes.
But Grant has accidentally picked up the dead man's newspaper, and cannot put an odd little verse written on it out of his mind. His search for answers to the riddle of the man's death takes him to the Western Isles, and to the regaining of his equilibrium.
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