Josephine Tey is one of the aliases of Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896-1952). I discovered her in 2022, and have since read Brat Farrar, The Daughter of Time, and The Franchise Affair. This is my first this year, though...

The central character is the inspector who appears in a number of Tey's novels. After The Franchise Affair, I resolved to read "a more conventional Alan Grant novel -- one in which he is a) present for more than a few paragraphs; and b) not dealing with a case that's hundreds of years old..." Well, The Singing Sands, published posthumously in 1952, is such a one.


This article shows us another entry in the Terrible Covers competition...

I enjoyed it a lot. For a start, it opens in a way that's irrestible. It's March. It's six o'clock in the morning. It's still dark. And a night train is coming to the end of its journey to Scotland. OK. I'm hooked...

On this train is Inspector Alan Grant. Except he's not doing much inspecting at the moment, because he's on sick leave. And it's interesting, this, because he's suffering from a mental illness. The doctors say it's caused by overwork, and it manifests itself as an unpredictable and overpowering feeling of claustrophobia.

So, poor Grant has spent the train journey steeling himself not to open the compartment door. He succeeded: "But the triumph had been dearly bought. He was drained and empty; a walking nothingness... Hell wasn't a nice cosy place where you fried. Hell was a great cold echoing cave where there was neither past or future; a black echoing desolation. Hell was concentrated essence of a winter morning after a sleepless night of self-distaste." Powerful stuff.

His boss has also been less than sympathetic: "What is the Force coming to! In my young days you stayed on duty until you fell over." Grant feels like "a poor nerve-ridden creature at the mercy of non-existent demons". He dreaded telling his subordinate, and watching his admiring face turn to concern -- or was it pity? And we're privy to several episodes in which he struggles with being in a car: "The tide of his panic rose with a slow abominable meance. A black evil tide, scummy and revolting."

As he alights from the train, the inspector comes across the attendant trying to rouse a dead man in Compartment B7... Nothing to do with Grant, of course, in his off-duty situation. He tells the man to call the police, and goes off to stay with some long-standing friends.

But then he discovers he has inadvertently taken away a newspaper from the dead man's compartment. And scribbled on a blank bit of paper is a half-completed poem:

The beasts that talk
The streams that stand
The stones that walk
The singing sand
... ...
That guard the way
To Paradise

Grant can't forget this blighted young man -- "B Seven", as he calls him -- whom he somehow intuits is searching for something, and wrestling with something, just as he is. And bit by bit, he finds that his curiosity about the dead man is taking his mind off his ailment.

There's a brief newspaper article about the death on the train. The man is named as Charles Martin. French. Death by natural causes. Grant confirms this with underling Williams back at headquarters. There has been a proper investigation. It all stacks up.

But he can't stop wondering... One of the things I like about the book is the dialogues that Grant runs with himself. We all do this. Don't we...? But his sceptical laissez-faire self can't overcome his interested, terrier self. He goes to the library. And eventually he decides to go to Cladda, a fictional Hebridean island that's potentially the site of some singing sands. From his hotel in Oban, before he sets off, he places advertisements in the personal columns of the main daily newspapers, asking for information about the lines the dead man had written.


The Scottish mainland, 2019

Eventually, after his red-herring but salutary trip to the Islands, one Tad Cullen responds to his advert. He thinks he recognizes the style of the lines quoted, and wonders if they might have been written by his buddy, Bill Kenrick, who seems to have gone missing. But wait a minute... Wasn't the dead man Charles Martin?

The narrative changes gear here, and there are a number of lines of investigation, which lead us to a Very Bad Man. There has been murder; there has been an identity switch. As to who and why, I will say no more...

Grant cannot save Kenrick's life, but he can at least make sure that the dead man is honoured for what he had succeeded in doing before he died. And he is happy about that because he feels the case has restored him: "It was B Seven who had sent him to the Islands, on that mad, cold, blown search for nothing. In that strange absurd limbo he had done all those things that he could never have done elsewhere; he had laughed till the tears ran, he had danced, he had let himself be flung about like a leaf from one empty horizon to the next, he had sung, he had sat still and looked. And he had come back a whole man. He owed B Seven more than he could ever repay."

And the dead man had also saved him from falling in love with Zoe Kentallen... She's a great character. She doesn't try to tempt Allan to marriage, but then why would she? Tey wants us to ask ourselves why we would assume that either would be happier with the other.

The reveal and the denouement were a little unsubtle, I thought. A boastful self-accusatory letter, and then a fiery end on a French mountain. Hmmm...

Nevertheless, a fine read. And according to this source, Tey was already terminally ill while she was writing the novel. You can't help wondering what light this throws on Grant's frustration with his malady, or his resolve to remain single, or the idea of being rescued from oblivion, or even the letter from beyond the grave, and the final inferno.



***

Points of interest:

1. Scotland

-- Tey had no truck with Scottish nationalism... She mercilessly presents us with "Wee Archie", a pastiche of a revolutionary, who's not even Scottish, started learning Gaelic just two years ago but considers himself ready to write an epic, and lectures his audiences on "England's iniquities to a captive and helpless Scotland". According to Peter Hitchens, her work is "peppered with feline slashes" at the holders of such views. And this source notes that she actually toned down the invective against Wee Archie before publication...

-- She's also quite level-headed in her depiction of the Islands. She feels people romanticize these places, and does her best to puncture that balloon. Grant stays at the Cladda Hotel. Far from being the gateway to Tir nan Og (the land of youth, which is the Gaelic idea of heaven), it's freezing cold, and the food is bad... And horrors, there's SODA in the SCONES... Don't even start her about the winds... "Last winter it blew for a month on end," says the hotel-keeper, "You got so used to the roar of it that if it died away for a moment you thought you'd gone deaf." The Islanders' attitude to time reminded me of the Manx concept of traa dy liooar: "Out here no one ever thinks of rapping on a counter. Today, tomorrow, or next week is all the same to an Islander."

-- Nevertheless, there's a stark, ethereal beauty, and there's great conviviality: "The wind howled along the skylights on the roof, the dancers yelled, the fiddle sawed, and the piano thumped, and a wonderful time was had by all. Including Alan Grant. He swayed home through the stinging lash of hail wielded by a pitiless south-wester, and dropped into bed drunk with exercise and fresh air. It had been a delightful day."

2. Tey's beautiful writing

-- She can do funny: "The little swing mirror on the chest of drawers lived up to its promise in the first respect but not in the second. It would swing with ease amounting to abandon through the whole circle of three hundred and sixty degrees; but it did not reflect anything to any noticeable degree. A last year's cardboard calendar folded in four kept its gyratory talents in check, but nothing of course could be done to increase its powers of reflection."

-- She can do simile: "[Being out in the wind] was rather like walking with a bad-mannered dog; a dog that rushes past you on narrow paths, leaps on you in ecstasy so that you are nearly knocked over, and drags you from the direction in which you want to go."

-- She can do lyrical: "There was nothing else in all the world but the green torn sea and the sands." Or: "London was a misty grey with scarlet trimmings... London was a water-colour of grey reflections with spots of vermilion oil paint where the buses plunged dripping through the haze."



3. Little insights into the early 1950s

-- Things have gone downhill a little, at least as seen through Grant's eyes: "Service, he thought, had lost its starch and its high glaze. It had become what housewives call rough-dried." And two characters comment on the disappointing state of baps. They're poor-quality things, with "no chew in them at all", and no taste...

-- You apparently need to be a millionaire to travel First Class on a British railway...

-- Meanwhile, flying is a thing, it seems... Grant flies back from the Islands (his claustrophobia now fortunately on its way out).

-- Tey briskly defends the aristocracy. Subject to so many stereotypes, poor things. In fact, is there even such a class, she questions. Grant: "It has never been possible in England for any class to keep themselves to themselves, as you call it. They have been intermarrying at all levels for two thousand years." Not convinced, personally...

***

With this one, I've now read Tey's Big Four. But she's a good enough writer to merit an exploration of some lesser known pieces. More, then, to come.