Tey, Josephine - The Singing Sands (1952)

C

Tey’s last book, posthumously published.  It’s not a great mystery; it’s a shaggy dog story which Tey apparently made up as she went along, with a plot dottier than most of Gladys’s.  Still, there’s some excellent stuff about Grant’s recovery from a nervous breakdown and claustrophobia.  (In The Daughter of Time, physically incapable; here, mentally weakened.  In other books— The Man in the Queue, A Shilling for Candles—comes close to breakdown.)  The Scottish setting (Highlands and islands) is good, and the fabulous, lost Arabian city and extraordinarily vain villain are both fun, if daft.

Tey’s a likeable writer—hardly a great plotter, not very interested in mystery, but good at sympathetic characterisation—soothing, gentle, warm, and humorous.

·        Grant essentially an amateur detective here.

·        Disabled detective: Dickinson’s One Foot in the Grave.

·        American sidekick: Daughter of Time.

Nick Fuller.