While I strongly recommend Michael Innes's "Appleby Talks About Crime," reviewed in my last post, it would be wrong of me not to invite you to look back on at least two other books by Michael Innes that I consider to be truly outstanding. Not mentioning them here would be a little like inviting you to enjoy some really delicious dessert candy while ignoring your excellent dinner.
I have posted before about "Lament for a Maker
," one of the early Innes novels featuring John Appleby, which I think is one of the best mysteries - overall - ever written. It is set in a remote castle in the Scottish Highlands, where the autocratic and miserly laird falls to his death from a high tower. Did he merely fall, or was he pushed or did he jump? Nothing is quite as it seems in this sometimes surreal exercise in impossible crimes. Innes tells his story through the eyes of a series of narrators, each of whom peels away more layers to come closer and closer to the truth - and when that truth is revealed, it will be devastating for some of the characters. There is some wonderful and occasionally bizarre humor - wait until you meet the "learned rats," for example - as well as some real tragedy. The whole thing is beautifully written, and it remains one of my favorite mysteries, to be re-read and savored again from time to time. You can listen to my earlier review here.
If you prefer thrillers to more cerebral mysteries, let me recommend "The Journeying Boy
," which I reviewed here a few months ago. Appleby is not featured - in fact, with typical Innes humor, he is mentioned only in passing, and disparagingly, by this book's detective. But this is primarily a thriller - one where the reader, who is being fed two different threads more or less simultaneously, is in a better position than any of the characters to understand what is going on. Briefly, an out-of-work tutor is hired to accompany a precocious, if trouble-making, schoolboy on a holiday to Ireland - and finds himself in a world of intrigue, fighting off apparent kidnapping attempts and armed raids, not to mention the occasional murder. All of this is told in a very high-spirited narrative with a great deal of humor; I am particularly fond of one extended sequence of surreal humor, which takes place at night in an Irish mansion, where the tutor and some unidentified would-be burglars (or something more) cautiously track each other around the darkened house. It is first rate fun. Again, you can listen to my complete review here.
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