2021/059: The Man in the Queue -- Josephine Tey

[tamaranth]

2021/059: The Man in the Queue -- Josephine Tey

No thorough Englishman used such a weapon. If he used steel at all he took a razor and cut a person’s throat. But his habitual weapon was a bludgeon, and, failing that, a gun. This was a crime that had been planned with an ingenuity and executed with a subtlety that was foreign to an Englishman’s habit of thought. The very femininity of it proclaimed the dago, or at the very least one used to dago habits of life. [p.12]

A man is stabbed in the press of a theatre queue: it's the last week of 'Didn't You Know', a musical featuring ingenue Ray Marcable, and everyone is keen to see the show once more. The dead man is Albert Sorrell, a small-time bookmaker, and none of the people in the queue saw -- or realised they were seeing -- the person who stabbed him with a silver-hilted dagger.

Published in 1929, this was Tey's first crime novel, written under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, and is rife with period-typical racism. (The 'dago' of the quote above has an Italian grandmother. Horrors! a foreigner!) It's also not very satisfactory as a whodunnit: Inspector Alan Grant, esteemed by the Metropolitan Police for his insight, pursues the obvious suspect doggedly, but has a lingering sense that he's missed something. Which he can certainly be forgiven for, since when the murderer's identity was revealed I felt somewhat cheated.

A spendid evocation of London (and Scotland, and 'trim' Eastbourne) nearly a century ago; an unsatisfactory whodunnit; unsavoury opinions; great characterisation. It hasn't put me off Tey, but I can't say I really liked it.