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The Singing Sands | 
 enlarge | Author: Josephine Tey
Creator: Robert Barnard
Publisher: Touchstone
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $2.01
You Save: $11.99 (86%)
New (25) Used (34) from $0.91
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 106561
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.5
ISBN: 0684818922
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780684818924
ASIN: 0684818922
Publication Date: December 16, 1996
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Product Description
On sick leave from Scotland Yard, Inspector Alan Grant finds a dead man aboard the night train to Scotland and is drawn into the mystery of the man's death by the lines--""the singing sands, that guard the way to paradise""--that are written on the dead man's newspaper. Reprint. 15,000 first printing. NYT.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Character study with mystery vehicle November 18, 2006
pp. 176-7: "It was Grant's experience that it was the irrelevant, the unconsidered words in a statement that were most important." One more quote for my collection--but it's relevant to this book. Most of this "mystery" is a character study of Grant's overworked psyche. It approaches literature in the high quality of the writing. However, she uses a great many unknown-to-me British colloquialisms which can be a bit annoying. As usual, this is not a Christie-like challenge mystery where the reader has to match wits with the detective & figure out whodunnit. I found this book rather slow moving--Tey's works have a dearth of action. However, the mystery is quite clever as is Grant's method of unraveling it. The ending is not, however, a big surprise except for the means whereby Grant discovers the truth for certain. This is probably one of Tey's (i.e.Elizabeth MacKintosh a.k.a. Gordon Daviot) better books but not, IMHO as good as "Brat Farrar" or the wonderful "Daughter of Time."
 Tey's 8th and final mystery novel (1952) May 26, 2005
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
"The beasts that talk,
the streams that stand,
the stones that walk,
the singing sand..."
- found on an unidentified corpse, herein
I enthusiastically recommend the unabridged audio recording by Stephen Thorne. He speaks beautifully; he voice-acted Aslan in the 1979 animated version of THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE.
As in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, Grant isn't in the best of health, but this time he's on sick leave for work-related stress (in the form of claustrophobia) rather than physical injury. Unable to sleep on a train journey to Scotland, Grant has the honor of being present when the laziest railway employee in captivity discovers a corpse in a neighbouring compartment, taken at first to be dead drunk rather than merely dead - therefore not only escaping without tipping, but creating more work than 'old Yoghourt' has suffered in many a year. :)
That would have been the end of it - a dead man with an unusual face - except that Grant happened to pick up a half-written sonnet in the dead man's compartment: "The beasts that talk,/The streams that stand,/The stones that walk,/The singing sand..." *That* makes a change from Grant's daily round of investigation - what *was* the stranger up to? To Grant's eye for faces is coupled his hobby of analyzing character from handwriting style. (Hey, everybody has the right to be a bit quirky.)
Even without the mystery, I'd enjoy this as a novel; Grant is, of course, in Scotland to visit his married cousin Laura whom we heard about in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME. (Personally, if I'd been Tey's editor, I'd have recommended that she make Grant's health-related trip to Scotland the same trip he was planning at the end of his hospital stay in THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, rather than coming up with an unrelated health issue in the very next book.) Grant simultaneously struggles to conquer and conceal his claustrophobia while poking into the open-and-shut case of accidental death his colleagues aren't interested in.
 Fairly good mystery reading October 5, 2003
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
Good story, good characterization good descriptions easy to hold onto difficult to put down.
Oh What a Wonderful Tey! June 6, 2003
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
This book is definitely my favourite of the Ins. Grant series. It is truly unfortunate that Ms. Tey was taken from us so young. Just think what she would have written! This book was published posthumously after her untimely death. It is as perfect a mystery as you will ever come across. In the book Grant is going on a holiday. On the train that he has taken to go to Scotland to visit friends, a young man is found dead in his room. It truly looked like misadventure, but something about it disturbed Grant and got him searching a trail that took him to the Hebrides, back to London, and to Marseilles. And what actually got him going on this impossible search were a few lines of poetry scrawled on a newspaper that the young victim had had with him before he died. Wonderful story!
It may take some time to appreciate April 10, 2002
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
The concept behind Tey's *The Singing Sands* immediately drew me in. A bit of poetry written on a newspaper leads the inspector to solve a crime that only he believes is indeed actually a crime. Yes, very interesting. However, once I started reading I found the pacing a little slow. Grant was far more introspective, more concerned with his own fears, than most mystery protagonists. Which was not, by any means, a bad thing. I just had to adjust my mindset a bit. Once I realized that this was not to be a typical solve it and feel good mystery, I found myself sinking in, slowly. Admittedly, it took me a couple of days after finishing the novel to appreciate it, to find it a satisfying read. But one thing has definitely come from reading *The Singing Sands*--I'm now looking forward to reading more Josephine Tey novels.
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