Michael Innes was one of the liveliest and most prolific of the writers of the Golden Age of Mystery. He is a favourite author of my good friend and colleague Charlie Cochrane. As her own books are set in a Cambridge College, it is not surprising that she is especially fond of Death at the President's
Lodging.I share her admiration for Innes but tend to prefer A Night of Errors or Appleby and Honeybath (my next post will be a review of Appleby and Honeybath.) Charlie and I are in good company, Edmund Crispin admired Innes so much that he chose his writing name from one of Innes' characters.
Michael Innes was
the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart. Born in Scotland in
1906, Innes was educated at Edinburgh Academy and later at Oriel
College, Oxford, where he studied English Literature. In 1929 he went
to Vienna to study psychoanalysis. From 1930 to 1935 he lectured at
the University of Leeds. In 1932, he married Margaret Hardwick and
they were together for forty-seven years, until her death in 1979;
they had three sons and two daughters. Margaret Hardwick was his
landlady's daughter and the prompt arrival of their children left the
family in urgent need of a better income, which was one of the
reasons they decided to emigrate to Australia.
From 1936 to 1946,
Stewart was Professor of English in the University of Adelaide, South
Australia. It was in 1936, on board ship, on the journey out, that he
wrote his first 'Michael Innes' novel, Death at the President's
Lodging featuring his best known
creation, John Appleby, at this time a Detective Inspector at
Scotland Yard. In his memoir,
Myself and Michael Innes,
Stewart gives three reasons for turning to detective fiction. One is
that he felt he did not have the talent or experience to be a
novelist and he did not write non-genre fiction until 1954 when he
published Mark Lambert's Supper
under his own name. The
second reason he claimed for writing mystery stories was that it was
'respectable,' indeed many academics of the time had turned to
writing mysteries. The third reason was that he needed the money to
support his growing family.
In 1946, having
written another nine Appleby novels, he returned to the United
Kingdom. In Appleby's End (1945) John Appleby marries
sculptress, Judith Raven, and retires, for the first time, to live in
the country. However by 1947 in A Night of Errors, Appleby has
returned to detection if not to the police force. From 1946 to 1948,
Stewart lectured in English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The
Journeying Boy (1949) has a richly drawn and comic Irish
background which echoes this time in Ireland . In 1948 Stewart
returned to Oxford University.
In 1973, when
Stewart retired, he was a professor of Oxford university. As J.I.M.
Stewart he was a notable academic and wrote full-length critical
studies of Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce and Thomas Love
Peacock and aspects of Shakespeare's work. His last published work
was his memoir, Myself and Michael Innes. (1987)
Myself and
Michael Innes is a collection of elegantly written and often
amusing anecdotes about his life as an academic and observations
about writing a crime novel, in which he speaks of the problems of
keeping the plot on track while fully developing characters and
settings. Myself and Michael Innes is remarkable for
the skilful and charming way Stewart entertains while avoiding to
give any of his inner life away.
The crime writer
Julian Symons described Innes as a 'farceur' and, in Myself and
Michael Innes, Innes acknowledges that he has attempted 'to
bring a little fantasy and fun into the detective story,' his
reason being that, 'Detective stories are purely recreational
reading, after all, and needn't scorn the ambition to amuse as well
as puzzle.'
This sums up the
heart of the Innes' books. They are entertainment, humorous, witty
and frequently highly improbable. His books have a literary or
artistic theme running through them and this, quite often, provides
the motivation behind the crime. Usually set in the academic world or
in the homes of the aristocracy, it is interesting to note that
Innes' depiction of the nobly born is sometimes of endearingly
eccentric characters but often of arrogant, stupid and selfish
noblemen who thoroughly deserve whatever unpleasant fate befalls
them. Many of the mysteries centre around their possession of some
literary or artistic treasure that
they either do not appreciate and
wish to reject, conceal,
destroy or profit by.
In The Ampersand Papers (1978) Lord Ampersand is
irritated by requests from academics to study his family papers and
Lord Ampersand's son and heir, Lord Skillet, comes up with a
malicious and eccentric way of discouraging these visitors:
'What Lord
Skillet had thought of seemed itself attended with an element of
risk. Why not constitute that large upper chamber something that
could be called a muniment room; fix over the entrance to it, in a
temporary way, one of those rope-and-pulley affairs used to hoist
things up into warehouses; and then deposit in it by this method all
the Ampersand papers that ever were? The sort of people who devoted
themselves to antiquarian pursuits and crackpot researchings would
not be of a temper to remain undaunted by so arduous – indeed
perilous – a path to knowledge. They'd take one look and give
Treskinnick a wide berth.
Lord Ampersand
was at first rather shocked by the levity of his son's proposal. But
as well as being funny, there was something faintly malign about it
that appealed to the arrogant side of his nature.'
One thing these
noblemen have in common is a sense of entitlement, not because of
their achievements but because of their birth. Even Appleby's wife,
Judith, has a sense of entitlement that Appleby, who comes of
middle-class stock, finds disconcerting:
'Appleby, who
was fond of admitting that he was a very conventional man, stared at
his wife aghast. “Ask for him? We can't barge in on a total
stranger.”
“He can't be a
total stranger to Uncle Julius. Uncle Julius knows all the other nobs
in the county, I suppose. We could explain I was his niece.”
Appleby's alarm
grew. This social outrage was already vivid in his imagination.
“It just isn't
done,” he said.' (A Connoisseur's Case, 1962.)
John Appleby is
Innes' chief detective creation and, at the start of his stories, he
is a detective inspector at Scotland Yard. Appleby is a quiet,
eminently civilised man. Despite his middle-class background he moves
with ease amongst the aristocracy and academics that he has to
investigate. He is well-educated and erudite and his insight into
literature and art often provides the vital clue to the case. Appleby
is one of the longest lived protagonists in detective fiction. His
career started with Death At the President's Lodging in 1936
and continued for fifty years until his last case, Appleby and
the Ospreys in 1986. One of the greatest mysteries surrounding
Appleby is his extraordinary career. Appleby retired at an early age
just after the Second World War, soon after meeting his wife, Judith.
(Appleby's End, 1945.) He was involved in two investigations
as a civilian and then reappeared a in A Private View (1952)
as Sir John Appleby, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police. His meteoric rise is neither chronicled nor excused by his
creator. Even after his second retirement, Appleby becomes involved
in a large number of cases and leads the official investigators in
the right direction. Although occasionally the police in charge of
the investigation are less than impressed by his intervention, in
most cases they welcome assistance from a man of Appleby's
reputation, especially a man who by his own knighthood and by his
wife's aristocratic connections, has entry into places and secrets
where an ordinary police detective has no hope of being admitted.
During both his retirements, Appleby expresses his unwillingness to
be involved in the case and, inevitably, he is drawn in. Soon after
his first retirement, when a police friend asks him to accompany him
to the home of a murdered baronet, Appleby replies: '“I've had
my fill of murdered baronets – and especially at midnight, as you
say. The annals of the Yard are glutted with them. It was hard at
times to believe that any could be left alive in England. For you
must add, you know, all those we were obliged to hang... Who is it?”'
(A Night of Errors, 1947.) And there in the last three words
is the sound of a man taking the bait.
Appleby is Innes'
main detective but there are other cases solved by Charles Honeybath,
a well-known portrait painter and a friend of Appleby, who first
appears in The Mysterious Commission (1974.). In
Appleby and Honeybath (1983), the two men combine to
investigate. Although Honeybath first discovers the body, it is
Appleby who actually solves the mystery. In some of the later Appleby
mysteries, Appleby's son, Bobby, also investigates.
As well as the
Appleby and Honeybath series, Innes wrote several stand alone mystery
novels, but all his books were written in the same humorous, elegant
style. 'In his books, he concerned himself more with style and
humor than with realism, and his work was widely admired.' (The
New York Times Obituary for J.I.M. Stewart.) Innes certainly placed
humour above any form of realism. Coincidences abound, both in the
plots and in the detection of the crime; his characters are
outrageous and (apart from Appleby, Honeybath and their close family
and friends) quite often unlikeable. Many of the names could easily
grace a Restoration Comedy. Lord Osprey (a tedious, nervous and
rambling old gentleman); Honoria Wimpole (a well-born and decisive
young lady); Trumfitt (the enormous and threatening local publican);
Miss Minnichip (the local spinster); Mr Broadwater (a dedicated
fisherman); Bagot (the ancient-retainer butler); Rupert Quickfall (a
successful barrister) can all be found in the last Appleby novel,
Appleby and the Ospreys (1986), but similar gems can be found
in all the Innes' novels.
However Innes'
novels are not just about humour, even of the most elegant literary
kind. The plots are intricate and fascinating and his understanding
of psychology and motivation is excellent. As a young man he had
travelled to Vienna to study Freudian psychology and this is evident
throughout his work. The first pages of A Night of Errors
(1947) beautifully illustrate the on-going emotional destruction of
one person by another.
'”Lucy,”
said Lady Dromio, “can you see the little silver bell?”
There was a lot
of silver on the tea-table; nevertheless Lucy did not trouble to
survey it, or to take her eyes from the single fleecy cloud sailing
almost directly overhead.
“No, mama.
Swindle has forgotten it.”
“How very
vexatious.” Lady Dromio, who had been peering despondently into an
empty hot-water jug, glanced with equal despondence over the
spreading lawns by which she was surrounded... “How very vexing,”
Lady Dromio repeated.
“Yes, mama.
But the situation is a familiar one.”
“Familiar,
child?” From under her white hair the faded blue eyes of Lady
Dromio expressed a large, vague surprise.
“Swindle, I
think, has a horror of the ringing bell. He avoids it. One day he
will undoubtedly try to avoid the clangour of the angel's trumpet
too.”
“Lucy, dear,
what odd, clever things you say.” Lady Dromio's tone was placid,
but there was a remorselessness in the way she flicked open and shut
the lid of the hot-water jug... it brought Lucy to her feet – a
tall, dark girl in her early thirties, at once lackadaisical and
restless. Her movement was received by Lady Dromio as if it was
something entirely unexpected.
“Well, dear,
if you would like to fetch some that will be very nice.”
Lucy compressed
her lips, held out her hand for the hot-water jug and departed across
the lawn. Lady Dromio watched her go, turned to scrutinise her
tea-table, watched again. Across the hot lawn Lucy was almost out of
earshot. Lady Dromio called; she picked up and waved an empty
cream-jug. Lucy turned obediently back.'
Innes always
remained at his core J.I.M. Stewart, an academic and his
understanding of criminal motivation is informed not only by his
interest in psychology but also by his critical studies, especially
concerning Shakespeare. Much of the root of wrong-doing in the Innes'
mysteries comes from characters who are thoughtless, selfish, greedy
and ambitious, rather than deliberately setting out to kill. The
observation he made about Macbeth in his critical study Character
and Motive in Shakespeare (1949),
could apply to many of the
'villains'
in his books: 'The evil which may rise up in
a man's imagination may sweep him on to crime, particularly if... he
is imaginative without the release of being creative.'
My hero. Great article!
ReplyDeleteThanks for featuring this very under-appreciated writer. I enjoy his Inspector Appleby mysteries very much.
ReplyDelete