Book review: The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey

The seventh book I read in 2016 was the last of Josephine Tey's Alan Grant novels, The Singing Sands.  Inspector Grant is taking a leave of absence due to his nerves: a case of what we would today call claustrophobia.  Leaving behind the stresses of his job and the crowds of London, he is heading for a fishing holiday with family in Scotland when the sudden, unexplained death of a fellow passenger on his train intervenes to keep his mind off relaxation.

The title of the book derives from an incomplete snatch of verse written in the verge of the dead man's newspaper, a stanza which could have been left on the cutting room floor of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan":

The beasts that talk,

The streams that stand,

The stones that walk,

The singing sand,

.........

.........

That guard the way

To Paradise.

These lines haunt Grant and, despite his best intentions to relax and forget about his job back home, entice him to investigate what has already been written off by Scotland Yard as an accidental death.

In the course of his investigation, he meets a Scots nationalist, a young and eligible widow, a pilot, and a scholar.  In the end, he not only unravels the identities of both the dead man and his murderer but also plays a part in the discovery of a long-lost Xanadu -- and, incidentally, overcomes his fits of nerves and returns rejuvenated to the force.