Inspector Grant travels north to Scotland for a holiday by train; he needs the break as stress , manifesting itself as chronic claustrophobia is slowly sending him mad.
As the train berths he is on hand when a passenger in a compartment near his is found dead. While observing this discovery he inadvertently picks up a newspaper from this compartment and later discovers a piece of verse scrawled on it in pencil.
While fishing on a friends estate on holiday he becomes somewhat haunted by the dead man and the lines of verse so for his mental well being begins a private investigation into the death.
This is excellent, Tey writes beautifully,with great humour and of course constructs a very good murder mystery.
As the previous owner of my edition has written on the cover- "Jolly good, well written".
Josephine Tey, the pseudonym of Elizabeth MacIntosh is now one of my favourite detective fiction writers. If you see her stuff about, grab it, it will be mostly second hand as unfortunately great swathes of writing talent from the last 100 years are just not getting re-issued. This is her last book published in 1952 the year she died aged 56 of cancer.
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