1952 mystery; sixth and last of Tey's novels of Inspector Alan Grant.
Suffering from overwork, Grant travels to Scotland for a few weeks'
fishing with an old friend. But as he leaves the overnight train, he
finds that one of his fellow travellers has died en route…
He doesn't drop everything to investigate: it wouldn't be his
job even if he were on duty. But some evidence he's accidentally
acquired, a fragment of poetry perhaps written by the deceased, keeps
nagging at him, and even as he's recovering he digs into what the
cryptic phrases might have meant. This will lead him to the Hebrides,
to take out newspaper advertisements to see if anyone recognises the
verse, and ultimately back to London.
And while the crime is important this is much more a novel of Alan
Grant than it is a detective story, particularly in the first half.
While the case seems to have come to a dead end, he seriously
contemplates retirement and marriage; but once things get moving,
those plans are forgotten along with the lady (who is never mentioned
again). It's very much a character arc, of a kind not often seen in
mysteries; does it make it a better mystery? Probably not. But it does
make for a solid book.
All right, everyone Grant likes is a good person, and everyone he
dislikes is a bad'un. We've seen this before in the series but it is
rather driven home here, as the bad'uns are also written to look
ridiculous, and all right-thinking people despise them (and the most
ridiculous of them turns out to be an actual foreign agent). The lower
orders are uniformly comic. I always try to put myself into a
contemporary mindset when reading old books, but sometimes it's hard
work here, with the combination of Scottish Cringe and moments of
casual racism.
Meanwhile Grant gets to the point of having solved the mystery, but
the process of proof is cut short when the malefactor sends him a
confession and then goes off to commit suicide for a related reason.
Which is rather abrupt, and somewhat unsatisfying.
There is some solidly excellent stuff here, but the manuscript of this
book was found in the author's papers after her death, and I like to
think that a second draft might have dealt with at least some of the
many minor problems.
Freely available in Canada at Faded
Page.