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The Man in the Queue (Inspector Alan Grant, #1)

Josephine Tey

Start date: June 1, 2016

Finish date: June 30, 2016

Discussion: Group reads

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What Members Thought

Dec 02, 2021 Teri-K rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery-golden-age

I find Tey's work uneven, but I liked Daughter of Time when I read it years ago, and just never followed up on her other books in that series, originally published under the Gordon Daviot name. I found the premise of this quite interesting - a crowded London queue where people wait for hours either talking to or ignoring their neighbors, the doors finally open, and one man falls to his knees in the line, dead. I liked that there were hardly any clues for Inspector Grant to follow up so he really ...more

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May 13, 2019 P. rated it liked it · review of another edition

Queue is filled with far and away too much description, awash in a flood of modifiers, and marked by the bizarre use of common words. I was surprised by Grant's [the top gun & our hero] amateurish detecting. Nice enough, but hardly stellar. ...more

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Feb 19, 2021 Nanosynergy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mysteries-thrillers-espionage, series, british, fiction, fiction-1920s, 2021read

First in the Josephine Tey Inspector Grant series (1929). Uneven writing, but some nice characterizations and overall story. Painful amount of racism and stereotyping that was likely the norm of the time. Book talked about a "race train" - something I've never heard about before. Appears to have been a train that took you to the horse races, but not much found in my Google searches. If someone has more info on what a 'race train' was, post in comments. ...more

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Oct 12, 2016 Laura marked it as abandoned-books

Eh, I gave up on this when Inspector Grant starts spinning wild hypotheses about the ethnicity of the murderer based solely on the theory that "no Englishman" would quietly stab someone in the back and sneak away and deduces that the culprit must be from the Levant (so specific!) due to using this method of dispatching with his victim. EYE ROLL. ...more

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Feb 21, 2019 Laura Anne rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, british-isles

Well-written; and while I liked the opening scenes and the chase scenes in the latter third, the middle was a slog. Moreover, the lead detective's case hinges on coincidences and racial profiling. (view spoiler) ...more

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