The novel that introduces the likeable but fallible Inspector Alan Grant
 |
| The Arrow edition of The Man in the Queue |
The Man in
the Queue, the first detective novel by Josephine Tey, was published in 1929,
just eight years after Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at
Styles, and six years after Dorothy L Sayers published her first novel, Whose Body?
But unlike
Poirot and Wimsey, Alan Grant is a detective by profession and not an amateur
sleuth. The novel is an early version of a police procedural and shows Grant
interacting with his superiors and subordinates and making use of the forensic
tools the police had at their disposal in the 1920s to try to solve the case.
Josephine Tey
was a pseudonym used by the writer Elizabeth MacIntosh, who was born in 1896 in
Scotland. She trained as a Physical Training instructor and taught at schools
in Scotland and England. In 1923 she returned to her family home in Inverness to care for
her invalid mother and keep house for her father and it was then that she began
writing.
The Man in
the Queue was her first mystery novel and introduced her series detective,
Inspector Alan Grant. It was awarded the Dutton Mystery Prize after it was
published in America.
MacIntosh’s main
ambition was to write a play that would have a run in the West End and her
drama, Richard of Bordeaux, was such a success when it was first staged in 1932
that it was transferred to the New Theatre, now the Noel Coward Theatre, where
it had a year-long run and made a household name of its young leading man, John
Gielgud.
As Josephine
Tey, MacIntosh produced six novels featuring Alan Grant. The fifth novel, The Daughter
of Time, published in 1951, was voted the greatest crime novel of all time by
the British Crime Writers Association in 1990. 
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym
used by Elizabeth MacIntosh
There is a
lot to like about The Man in the Queue. There are beautiful descriptions of Tey’s
native Inverness, where she sends Grant in pursuit of a suspect. All the
characters, police and suspects alike, are interesting and believable. Grant is
a well-rounded policeman, not just a caricature, who is looked after by his
landlady, dines regularly at a French restaurant, and is popular with the
ladies, making me keen to read the next book in the series, A Shilling for Candles.
Perhaps the
most striking thing about the novel is
the clever plot. Like other writers of the period, Tey is not afraid to show
Grant arresting the wrong man and feeling dissatisfied with his solution. She
also manages to keep the true identity of the murderer a secret right up to the
end.
The Man in
the Queue was republished by Arrow Books in 2011.
