Poona stuff all around

Rating:

A tutor and his reading-party of undergraduates spend a quiet fortnight at a Dartmoor inn, preparing for final examinations. Their usual idea of relaxation is composing scatty limericks. Sometimes the discussion becomes more serious. One evening, the tutor Pettigrew proposes that the passage into manhood requires a rite of initiation. Much to his regret, the discussion turns to the American concept of 'playing chicken.'

That night after the tutor retires to bed, six of the reading-party pile into an ancient automobile and set out on their own version of the supposed American pastime.

You may be wondering where Sir John Appleby makes his entrance into this moody thriller. Not until page 96, well after the undergraduate David Henchman discovers a body on the moor and is hunted, shot at, temporarily cornered in an abandoned bottle factory, and nearly run over.

When David and Appleby return to the scene of the murder on lonely Knack Tor, they discover a body but it's not the same one David found earlier. Someone has made a switch, and David slowly begins to realize that he and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner are involved in a second, much deadlier game of chicken.

The best features of this mystery-thriller-coming-of-age novel are the perilous, extended chase scene after David discovers the first body, and his interplay with Appleby whom he at first mistakes for a middle-aged London bureaucrat.

Innes writes this sort of brave, intelligent but basically innocent undergraduate coming-of-age-under-the-threat-of-death novel so very well. His serial detective Appleby has gotten a trifle old and cynical, but when he assumes the role of stern but witty mentor-under-fire he is at his best.

If you enjoy the type of thriller where an undergraduate romp turns deadly, try Innes's "The Secret Vanguard" (1940), "A Family Affair" (1969), "The Man from the Sea" (1955), "The Journeying Boy" (1949), or "Death at the Chase" (1970).

You'll smile at the antics and earnest dialogues of Innes's young men and women right before your hair starts to stand up on the back of your neck, as they accidentally intrude on murder or conspiracy most foul. Poona stuff all around.