Review: The Man In The Queue

The Man In The Queue by Josephine Tey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tey enjoys a good reputation as a writer, and this is the first of a well-regarded series, so I gave it a look. It's not a great book even for its time; relies too much on coincidence to keep the plot together, and the main character makes copious use of an ethnic slur for people of Mediterranean origin and generalizes wildly about how English people behave differently from foreigners, which puts him on completely the wrong track for most of the book. He's not as brilliant a detective as he thinks he is, and in the end this is one of those "only solved because the criminal confesses" books that I find so unsatisfactory. Still, I've read worse, and it's promising enough that I'll pick up the next book, on the understanding that this is a weak start to a stronger series.

HarperCollins have the brazen effrontery to say in the back of the book that their HarperPerennials series is "upholding the highest standards of ebook production," but, like most of their books, this one needs more editing. There are a lot of missing commas, fewer but still numerous missing closing quotation marks, and some obvious misreadings by the OCR process, at least one of which was so wrong I couldn't even figure out what the word should have been. Project Gutenberg, who are staffed by volunteers and so can take more time correcting the scans, generally do a better job than major publishers (and especially HarperCollins) of tidying up these old books, but at time of review this one isn't on Project Gutenberg. The 1929 publication date means it should make it there soon, hopefully.

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