Inspector Alan Grant Series

Recommended Reading Order

1. The Man in the Queue

   • Josephine Tey

   • 256 pages
   • 9 hours of reading

   A long line had formed for the standing-room-only section of the Woffington Theatre. Didn't You Know?, London's favorite musical comedy for the past two years, was finishing its run. The line began to move, but one man, his head sunk down upon his chest, slowly sank to his knees and keeled over. A spectator moved to help, but recoiled in horror: The man in the queue had a small silver dagger neatly plunged into his back. So begins Inspector Alan Grant's first case, and it's up to the dapper detective to discover how a murder was committed among so many witnesses . . .

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2. A Shilling for Candles

   • Josephine Tey

   Beneath the sea cliffs of the south coast, suicides are a sad but common fact. Inspector Grant has to take a more professional attitude: death by suicide, however common, has to have a motive - just like murder...

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3. Pocket MYS/SUS: The Franchise Affair

   • Josephine Tey

   Robert Blair was about to knock off from a slow day at his law firm when the phone rang. It was Marion Sharpe on the line, a local woman of quiet disposition who lived with her mother at their decrepit country house, The Franchise. It appeared that she was in some serious trouble: Miss Sharpe and her mother were accused of brutally kidnapping a demure young woman named Betty Kane. Miss Kane's claims seemed highly unlikely, even to Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, until she described her prison -- the attic room with its cracked window, the kitchen, and the old trunks -- which sounded remarkably like The Franchise. Yet Marion Sharpe claimed the Kane girl had never been there, let alone been held captive for an entire month! Not believing Betty Kane's story, Solicitor Blair takes up the case and, in a dazzling feat of amateur detective work, solves the unbelievable mystery that stumped even Inspector Grant.

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4. To Love and Be Wise

   • Josephine Tey

   It was rumoured that Hollywood stars would go to any lengths for the privilege of being photographed by the good-looking, brilliantly talented and ultra-fashionable portrait photographer Leslie Searle. But what was such a gifted creature doing in such an English village backwater as Salcott St Mary? And why -- and how -- did he disappear? If a crime had been committed, was it murder…fraud…or simply some macabre practical joke?

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5. The Daughter of Time

   • Josephine Tey

   • 207 pages
   • 8 hours of reading

   Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant is intrigued by a portrait of Richard III. Could such a sensitive face actually belong to a heinous villain — a king who killed his brother's children to secure his crown? Grant seeks what kind of man Richard was and who in fact killed the princes in the tower.

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   3.8

6. The Singing Sands

   • Josephine Tey

   • 187 pages
   • 7 hours of reading

   On sick leave from Scotland Yard, Inspector Alan Grant is planning a quiet holiday with an old school chum to recover from overwork and mental fatigue. Traveling on the night train to Scotland, however, Grant stumbles upon a dead man and a cryptic poem about 'the stones that walk' and 'the singing sand, ' which send him off on a fascinating search into the verse's meaning and the identity of the deceased. Grant needs just this sort of casual inquiry to quiet his jangling nerves, despite his doctor's orders. But what begins as a leisurely pastime eventually turns into a full-blown investigation that leads Grant to discover not only the key to the poem but the truth about a most diabolical murder

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