The Singing Sands

 The Singing Sands (1952) by Josephine Tey (Elizabeth MacKintosh)

The last of Tey's Inspector Grant novels (and her last novel altogether as this one was published posthumously) finds Grant on sick leave. His doctor advises a holiday with a hobby--fishing in Scotland will be just the thing. He's suffering from overwork and panic attacks which exhibit themselves primarily in claustrophobia and the train journey north to stay with friends is excruciating. The only thing that takes his mind off his troubles is a brief encounter with a man presumed passed out drunk. The conductor had tried to rouse him and asked Grant's help. Previous experience tells Grant that the man is dead and when the conductor wails, "What shall I do?" Grant tells him to call the police. The conductor is dismayed (he'll be delayed getting off to his elevenses), but Grant is glad that the affair is none of his business.

Except...he can't get the man out of his mind. The young man had an interesting face, even in death, and when Grant finds that he has absentmindedly walked off with a newspaper from the man's compartment...a newspaper that has an odd bit of verse pencilled in the margin...

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

he wonders what kind of man the deceased was. Who was he? Where was he going? What business would bring such a man to the rural area of Scotland? This puzzle helps Grant to recover far more quickly than any fishing for trout. to 

He writes to his office to confess to having abstracted the newspaper (and telling of the odd bit of marginalia) but finds they aren't interested. The man has been identified as a Frenchman who had had one too many and stumbled backwards against the washbasin in a deadly blow. Except Grant just can't believe it. He places an advertisement in the papers asking if anyone can identify the bit of verse. The advert produces one Tad Cullen, a flyer with a company that delivers to Arabia. Cullen is in search of a missing friend....a friend who just happened to quote that bit of poetry one night when a little drunk. Soon Grant and Cullen are off on a quest to prove that one deceased Charles Martin, Frenchman, is actually the missing Bill Kenrick. But who wanted to kill Kenrick and why stuff his pockets with the identity papers of a Frenchman? By the end of the story, Grant will know that answer and will also be cured of his claustrophobic anxiety.

I was much more enamored of this one when I read it the first time (30-ish years ago). I was just getting myself firmly planted in the vintage mystery world after flirting heavily with it about ten-fifteen years before that. Reading this now, there are two things that keep this from being a four-star mystery. First, it takes a very long time for the investigation to get moving. Grant keeps thinking about it and makes a trip all the way to the singing sands in the Hebrides (but doesn't really find anything there), but things don't start hopping until Tad Cullen shows up (at just about the half-way mark). One hundred pages out of a two-hundred page mystery is a fair way to go for the investigation to take off when the dead body has appeared in chapter one. And second, Grant doesn't exactly solve the case (yes, there is fingerprint evidence working its way to him, but...). The murderer sends him a nicely written confession before doing him/herself in. If the first half of the book hadn't been unsatisfying in its lack of detective action, then I might have been more amenable to the confession as wrap-up. But having both just didn't work so well for me. ★★★

First line: It was six o'clock of a March morning, and still dark.

Last line: What a most extraordinary idea.
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Deaths = 3 (one hit on head; two airplane crash)