English · Intermediate
Read The Man in the Queue in Englishwith every sentence explained
Josephine Tey · 1929
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About the book
The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey was first published in 1929. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under mystery and crime and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 79,900 words.
A packed London crowd. A man dead on his feet. And nobody saw a thing.
It is the last week of London's most popular musical, and the queue outside the Woffington Theatre stretches down the lane in the March drizzle. Everyone is desperate for one more glimpse of the dazzling star Ray Marcable before she leaves for America. When the doors finally open and the crowd surges forward, one man slumps to the ground. He has been stabbed in the back with a small, elegant dagger.
The victim carries nothing that says who he is. The people around him were pressed so close that the killer must have stood within inches, yet no one noticed anything at all.
Enter Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, sharp, stubborn and very human. This is his first case, and Josephine Tey's first novel, from the author who later wrote the classic The Daughter of Time.
- Author
- Josephine Tey
- First published
- 1929
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Mystery and Crime, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 79,900 words
How it opens
It was between seven and eight o’clock on a March evening, and all over London the bars were being drawn back from pit and gallery doors. Bang, thud, and clank. Grim sounds to preface an evening’s amusement. But no last trump could have so galvanized the weary attendants on Thespis and Terpsichore standing in patient column of four before the gates of promise. Here and there, of course, there was no column. At the Irving, five people spread themselves over the two steps and sacrificed in warmth what they gained in comfort; Greek tragedy was not popular.
Reading The Man in the Queue in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
