The Singing Sands

Inspector Alan Grant is on a sleeper from London to somewhere in the north of Scotland, to spend time with a cousin, fishing and recovering from a nervous breakdown. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately for Grant – a young man in an adjacent compartment is found dead on arrival, the result (it seems) of a drunken accident. Grant absent-mindedly picks up the dead man’s newspaper along with his own and finds a mysterious verse scribbled on its margin. 


From then on the mysterious occupant of compartment B7 engrosses him in a way that brings him out of his own trauma and ready to face the world again. 


It’s a whodunnit, yes, because you’ll have guessed that B7 didn’t die by accident; but it’s much more than that. Josephine Tey’s insights, characters and rich vocabulary lift this well above most of its genre.