Inspector Alan Grant Books in Order

Inspector Alan Grant is Josephine Tey’s main series detective: a Scotland Yard inspector who is clever without being flashy, patient rather than flamboyant, and always more interested in people than in puzzles. Across six novels you follow him through theatres, seaside towns, quiet villages and hospital wards as he worries away at crimes that often look simple at first glance and turn out to be anything but.

The series begins with The Man in the Queue, when a man is stabbed while waiting to see a hit West End musical. From that starting point you see how Grant works: following small slips in behaviour, testing his own assumptions and refusing to rest until the story behind the crime makes human sense. The follow‑up, A Shilling for Candles, takes him to the Kent coast to untangle the death of film star Christine Clay and opens up Tey’s recurring fascination with celebrity, gossip and the gap between public image and private life.

In The Franchise Affair Grant steps back a little, appearing mainly at the edges of a notorious kidnapping case while a country solicitor does most of the legwork. The Sharpes, a mother and daughter accused of abducting a teenager, have the whole village and the tabloid press against them, and the tension comes from the slow question of who is telling the truth. Even when Grant is not centre stage, his world — the police force, the courts, the unwritten rules of class — shapes the story.

To Love and Be Wise sends Grant into an artistic village where a charming American photographer vanishes after a party. What starts as a missing‑person search becomes a knotty investigation of identity, attraction and the stories people tell about themselves. Tey uses the crime plot to move through bohemian drawing rooms, local pubs and riverside walks, quietly pricking at the pretensions of the literary set while Grant tries to work out whether a crime has even been committed.

Then the series turns inward.

In The Daughter of Time Grant is laid up in hospital with a broken leg and, out of boredom, turns his detective’s eye on the centuries‑old mystery of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. With the help of friends who fetch books and archive material, he treats history like a case file and gradually decides that the traditional story may be wrong. The final novel, The Singing Sands, finds him on sick leave after a breakdown, travelling to the Scottish Highlands and stumbling over the death of a fellow train passenger and a scrap of verse about “the singing sand”. The investigation becomes as much about Grant’s own recovery as about the dead man’s secret.

Taken together, the Alan Grant books offer a mix of classic Golden Age detection and a quieter, more questioning kind of crime novel. You can read them in order to watch Grant age, tire and adjust to a changing Britain, or dip in anywhere without feeling lost. Either way you get crisp prose, sharp character sketches and mysteries that ask not just who did it, but what doing it says about them.