Yet Grant’s public face is one of firm-but-fair open-minded rectitude. He picks subordinates who share his talent for trickery and lies and he and they default to covert methods of investigation. 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. This surprised me as Grant’s first instinct, in most cases, is to lie to get what he wants. 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. Grant is seen by his colleagues and superiors at Scotland Yard as having ‘flair‘. He seems comfortable in his isolation, which he appears to experience as freedom. He appears to have no close friends and no lovers. 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. Grant is a charming but emotionally distant introvert who assess the world from behind an extrovert’s smile.

I found that, the longer the book went on, the more I understood him and the less I liked him. Her main focus was Inspector Alan Grant, who appeared in six of her mystery books. The main thing I took away from the book was Tey’s ability to bring people and places alive. The ending, although plausible, was clumsily handled by comparison to the rest of the plot and left me dissatisfied. 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 manhunt that follows is methodical and sometimes ingenious but I didn’t find it engaging. The premise, an unknown man stabbed in a theatre queue by an unknown assailant, gives Grant the double challenge of identifying both parties.

The scenes in the theatre, both when Grant meets the star of the show in her dressing room and then sees beyond her glamour in her final performance hum with life and lift the book. 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 plot is a little improbable and the solution is clumsy by the people and places feel real, 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. That this was a debut mystery shows through a little in some less-than-perfect pacing and a slightly odd storytelling viewpoint.

The man in the queue