Customer Reviews

The Singing Sands

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This book is definitely my favourite of the Ins. Grant series. It is truly unfortunate that Ms. Tey was taken from us so young. Just think what she would have written! This book was published posthumously after her untimely death. It is as perfect a mystery as you will ever come across. In the book Grant is going on a holiday. On the train that he has taken to go to Scotland to visit friends, a young man is found dead in his room. It truly looked like misadventure, but something about it disturbed Grant and got him searching a trail that took him to the Hebrides, back to London, and to Marseilles. And what actually got him going on this impossible search were a few lines of poetry scrawled on a newspaper that the young victim had had with him before he died. Wonderful story!

"The Singing Sands" is Tey's most riveting and well-crafted novel. It has more wonderful characters, more variety and beauty in the scenery/locations, and a less intense pace than her other books. It also takes the reader deeper into Grant's psyche than any of the others.

Grant is a complex and interesting man, and his Scottish voyage is more than just chasing down a confounding mystery: it is a lonely and revealing internal journey for him, at the end of which he finds resolution and new depths in himself, comfort and at-homeness within.

Tey was fascinated with Grant and in "Sands" she explored new aspects of her delicious character, perhaps falling in little in love with him in the process. I know I did.

The concept behind Tey's *The Singing Sands* immediately drew me in. A bit of poetry written on a newspaper leads the inspector to solve a crime that only he believes is indeed actually a crime. Yes, very interesting. However, once I started reading I found the pacing a little slow. Grant was far more introspective, more concerned with his own fears, than most mystery protagonists. Which was not, by any means, a bad thing. I just had to adjust my mindset a bit. Once I realized that this was not to be a typical solve it and feel good mystery, I found myself sinking in, slowly. Admittedly, it took me a couple of days after finishing the novel to appreciate it, to find it a satisfying read. But one thing has definitely come from reading *The Singing Sands*--I'm now looking forward to reading more Josephine Tey novels.

I think it was Robert Barnard that pointed out Tey's avoidance of the "play fair" whodunnit--the type where a reader could deduce the solution from clues given a la Agatha Christie. That is certainly true here. Information is given to Inspector Grant by characters who are introduced quite late in the book. While these nuggets propel the narrative and lead to a satisfying conclusion, this is not the sort of mystery one could solve with the clues given.One reservation I have about her writing is her use of extended interior dialogues for Grant. They feel contrived and stilted. Otherwise I found the book compelling, especially due to the vivid atmosphere created. After reading it I have become quite interested in the Hebrides !

Because I have always adored The Daughter of Time, I recently spent a weekend with The Singing Sands, The Franchise Affair, and The Man in the Queue. Singing Sands I found compelling and satisfying in an old-fashioned way -- we get a deep, poetic examination of the hero's psychological journey and his Scottish surroundings. Fine irony and good jokes at the reader's expense made me enjoy this book even more.
DO read this Josephine Tey -- but, if you are wise, do not expect a similar treat from her first mystery, The Man in the Queue: the world of that book is too far away from ours.

This (posthumously published) novel shows Tey at her best. Inspector Alan Grant, on his way by train to Scotland for a long-overdue spell of R&R, is on hand when a young man's body is found in an adjoining compartment. By accident, he finds himself in possession of a clue that hints that something wasn't right about the young man's death; in his pursuit of the truth, he travels as far as the Hebrides and meets characters ranging from a lovely widow who looks good in waders to a world-famous Arabian explorer, a young pilot friend of the deceased, and the unforgettable Wee Archie. The story line seems to ramble at times, but the conclusion is highly satisfying. Thoroughly enjoyable.

pp. 176-7: "It was Grant's experience that it was the irrelevant, the unconsidered words in a statement that were most important." One more quote for my collection--but it's relevant to this book. Most of this "mystery" is a character study of Grant's overworked psyche. It approaches literature in the high quality of the writing. However, she uses a great many unknown-to-me British colloquialisms which can be a bit annoying. As usual, this is not a Christie-like challenge mystery where the reader has to match wits with the detective & figure out whodunnit. I found this book rather slow moving--Tey's works have a dearth of action. However, the mystery is quite clever as is Grant's method of unraveling it. The ending is not, however, a big surprise except for the means whereby Grant discovers the truth for certain. This is probably one of Tey's (i.e.Elizabeth MacKintosh a.k.a. Gordon Daviot) better books but not, IMHO as good as "Brat Farrar" or the wonderful "Daughter of Time."

Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard has worked too hard for too long; his flair is giving out on him and he's developed a tendency toward what we, these days, would call panic attacks. He's given the opportunity (or more likely, ordered) to take vacation and decides to visit his cousin in the Scottish Highlands. On the train north, two young men are overheard apparently planning to 'rob the Caley'; later, one of them is found dead, with a strange little verse in his possession. Grant, with his usual fascination for faces, is intrigued by the young man, and winds up inadvertently investigating his death.

By the time the book ends, you'll not only meet Grant's cousins, a noted explorer, a very strange Scottish nationalist and get a walking tour of parts of the Highlands and the islands of Scotland, but you'll find out where there really are singing sands, streams that stand and stones that walk. You'll also find out that 'rob the Caley' has nothing to do with the Caledonian (or a Scottish dance party :).

Tey's books are lovely slices of post-WWII Britain, a very different time and place. I've always been sorry a younger Sean Connery didn't get given her books for a movie -- he'd have been perfect as Grant.

Reading any Josephine Tey reminds us of why we write, the desire to achieve in the mystery genre the lyrical quality that blends a work across line into literary fiction.
THE SINGING SANDS was the final appearance of the Insp. Alan Grant. It was published after Ms. Tey's (Elizabeth MacKintosh) death in 1952 and may have been completed by someone else as there is a slight change of pace and style near the end.
Insp. Grant is gripped in claustrophobia and seeks refuge away from Scotland Yard at Clune in Scotland. When leaving the train he notices a porter manhandling the body of a dark, thin young man with reckless eyebrows. A few words of a sonnet written in a schoolboy hand are on a blank space in a newspaper that Grant inadvertently picks up at the death scene. The haunting words of the poems lead Grant to seek their physcial home to find his own cure and to repay the young man who had no more life to live.
You will enjoy every word of this outstanding murder mystery.
Nash Black, author of SINS OF THE FATHERS and TRAVELERS.

"The beasts that talk,
the streams that stand,
the stones that walk,
the singing sand..."
- found on an unidentified corpse, herein

I enthusiastically recommend the unabridged audio recording by Stephen Thorne. He speaks beautifully; he voice-acted Aslan in the 1979 animated version of THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE.

As in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, Grant isn't in the best of health, but this time he's on sick leave for work-related stress (in the form of claustrophobia) rather than physical injury. Unable to sleep on a train journey to Scotland, Grant has the honor of being present when the laziest railway employee in captivity discovers a corpse in a neighbouring compartment, taken at first to be dead drunk rather than merely dead - therefore not only escaping without tipping, but creating more work than 'old Yoghourt' has suffered in many a year. :)

That would have been the end of it - a dead man with an unusual face - except that Grant happened to pick up a half-written sonnet in the dead man's compartment: "The beasts that talk,/The streams that stand,/The stones that walk,/The singing sand..." *That* makes a change from Grant's daily round of investigation - what *was* the stranger up to? To Grant's eye for faces is coupled his hobby of analyzing character from handwriting style. (Hey, everybody has the right to be a bit quirky.)

Even without the mystery, I'd enjoy this as a novel; Grant is, of course, in Scotland to visit his married cousin Laura whom we heard about in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME. (Personally, if I'd been Tey's editor, I'd have recommended that she make Grant's health-related trip to Scotland the same trip he was planning at the end of his hospital stay in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, rather than coming up with an unrelated health issue in the very next book.) Grant simultaneously struggles to conquer and conceal his claustrophobia while poking into the open-and-shut case of accidental death his colleagues aren't interested in.