Sir John Appleby in shorts

Rating:

I think Michael Innes had fun writing these eighteen short detective stories, which are mined with really execrable puns. In fact, I'm guessing he may have come with the puns first and then fitted the stories to them.

Normally in his novels, character development is one of this author's great strengths. In these stories, he sometimes uses less effective short-cuts to show us his antagonists and protagonists. Adverbs are used with greater frequency---people pace nervously, glance cautiously, and nod soberly. There is a fair amount of caricature. Americans are always filthy rich and/or eccentric and they talk funny. Innes also lapses into veddy British upper-class snobbery, to let readers know that there is something not quite right about a criminal suspect.

However, even short-hand Innes is fun to read. His snobbery is delicious. His Americans are amusing. Assistant Commissioner of New Scotland Yard, Sir John Appleby is his usual ironic, witty, dangerously intelligent self. Art and literature are richly mined, as they are in this author's longer novels. A Pieter Breughel landscape is at the heart of one story. A speech from Hamlet forms an important clue in another.

I wouldn't start with this short story collection if you are new to Michael Innes, but "Appleby Talks Again" (1956) is a rich confectionary for his long-term fans--eighteen delicious morsels of mystery:

A Matter of Goblins
Was he Morton?
Dangerfield's Diary
Grey's Ghost
False Colours
The Ribbon
The Exile
Enigma Jones
The Heritage Portrait
Murder on the 7.16
A Very Odd Case
The Four Seasons
Here is the News
The Reprisal
Bear's box
Tom, Dick and Harry
The Lombard books
The Mouse-Trap