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I took a bag of books to my local Oxfam bookshop and inevitably emerged with another handful of reading matter, including Josephine Tey's first mystery, The Man in the Queue.
It's very much of its time (1929) so some of the language jars particularly in terms of both overt and covert racism, but that apart what struck me is that (like AA Milne's Red House Mystery) 80% of this book reads like a 2016 written m/m historical romantic mystery. The descriptions of young men and Inspector Grant's reactions to them are distinctly slashy; in fact, I'm reading Tey's book alongside Elin Gregory's Eleventh Hour, which is set in the same era, and I keep thinking, "which book was that bit in?"
Which shows how authentic Elin's sounds and how suspicious Tey's is.
It's very much of its time (1929) so some of the language jars particularly in terms of both overt and covert racism, but that apart what struck me is that (like AA Milne's Red House Mystery) 80% of this book reads like a 2016 written m/m historical romantic mystery. The descriptions of young men and Inspector Grant's reactions to them are distinctly slashy; in fact, I'm reading Tey's book alongside Elin Gregory's Eleventh Hour, which is set in the same era, and I keep thinking, "which book was that bit in?"
Which shows how authentic Elin's sounds and how suspicious Tey's is.
