After an enjoyable experience reading A Shilling for Candles, I was on the look out for more Inspector Grant mysteries. I happened to find a copy of The Man in the Queue in a second hand bookstore (before the lockdown) and since it was only $2, I snapped it up.

The Man in the Queue covers the murder of a man in a queue (big surprise). The tough part of this, for Inspector Grant, is that no one seems to know who he is and why he might have died. It’s going to take a lot of good old fashioned detective work for Grant to get to the bottom of this case.

Except it doesn’t. At the risk of slight spoilers (skip this whole paragraph if you want to avoid it), although Grant knows when he is on the wrong track, he doesn’t actually solve the mystery. The solution falls into his lap, so to speak. It’s a bit disappointing, especially since we spend most of the book following a different, and ultimately wrong, path. There were hints to to the truth, but mostly at the beginning and fairly few.

I looked up the book on Goodreads and apparently this is the first in the Inspector Grant series, which I guess is why the plot is like that? The book does do a good job of introducing us to Grant and how he thinks, and I think it has a fantastic atmosphere. Compared to A Murder is Announced, which I read just before this, The Man in the Queue feels darker and more sombre, even though A Murder is Announced does deal with serious topics. It also captured the feel of a city pretty well, I think. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the city that Grant moves in felt rather claustrophobic (unlike what I remembered of A Shilling for Candles) and full of too many people. Quite unlike the seemingly placid village that Miss Marple works in!

Overall, I liked this, although not as much as A Shilling for Candles. As the first book in the series, however, I enjoyed seeing how Grant is introduced and I’m still going to continue searching for more of Tey’s mysteries. I’ll end my review with a quote I like, because it’s connected to my favourite drink:

“Well, he would find out from the Yard if there was anything new, and if not he would fortify himself with tea. He needed it. And the slow sipping of tea conduced to thought.”

On this count, it seems that Grant and I are alike! (Although my thought process is not as sophisticated as his)

Featured Image: Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash