Appleby on Ararat [Hardcover]

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 9, 1971

Inspector Appleby is stranded on a very strange island, with a rather odd bunch of people - too many men, too few women (and one of them too attractive) cause a deal of trouble. But that is nothing compared to later developments, including the body afloat in the water, and the attack by local inhabitants.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Super-abundance of amazingly good talk crowds detecting into corner, with Appleby turning into an avenging angel in a fantastically thrilling finish. Tour de force.”–Saturday Review of Literature

About the Author

Born in Edinburgh in 1906, the son of the city's Director of Education, John Innes Mackintosh Stewart wrote a highly successful series of mystery stories under the pseudonym Michael Innes. Innes was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and named a Bishop Frazer's scholar. After graduation he went to Vienna, to study Freudian psychoanalysis for a year and following his first book, an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne, was offered a lectureship at the University of Leeds. In 1932 he married Margaret Hardwick, a doctor, and they subsequently had five children including Angus, also a novelist. The year 1936 saw Innes as Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, during which tenure he wrote his first mystery story, 'Death at the President's Lodging'. With his second, 'Hamlet Revenge', Innes firmly established his reputation as a highly entertaining and cultivated writer. After the end of World War II, Innes returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen's University, Belfast where in 1949 he wrote the 'Journeying Boy', a novel notable for the richly comedic use of an Irish setting. He then settled down as a Reader in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he retired in 1973. His most famous character is 'John Appleby', who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this day. Innes's other well-known character is 'Honeybath', the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in 1975 in 'The Mysterious Commission'. The last novel, 'Appleby and the Ospreys', was published in 1986, some eight years before his death in 1994. 'A master - he constructs a plot that twists and turns like an electric eel: it gives you shock upon shock and you cannot let go.' - Times Literary Supplement. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 254 pages
• Publisher: Greenwood Press Reprint (February 9, 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0837133777
• ISBN-13: 978-0837133775
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,746,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming, witty, intelligent... Innes rules!, June 2, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Appleby on Ararat (Hardcover)

(I save 10's for Dostoyevsky.)

Michael Innes in his usual perfection! Like any of his books, this one will delight you between dinner and bedtime. Skip that blind date and take out Michael Innes instead. He's the hippest, coolest Oxford don on the crime scene.

This one features George, my favorite aristocratic dog, as well as a young debonair Appleby in the pre-Judith days. The story starts out as a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck adventure (featuring a proper English spinster who goes native), turns into an offbeat drawing room comedy (with an entire cast of eccentric characters including the wonderful George), and ends up a World War II action-suspense thriller (with full sensurround fire and explosions)! Really, it does!

Along the way Innes' dry, hilarious prose drops little precious gems of insight and percipience. If you read Innes with your dictionary handy, you are guaranteed several arcane and ultra-cool additions to your vocabulary in every book. He's a sort of cross between Henry Fielding and Douglas Adams... kooky and hip and very, very well educated. If he is still alive, he is over eighty... and if I met him I would just swoon!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shipwrecked Sleuth, July 13, 2003

By 

hacklehorn - See all my reviews

This review is from: Appleby on Ararat (Inspector Appleby Mysteries) (Paperback)

A very strange and silly book that yet succeeds in being entertaining, despite (or because of?) that very quality. The plot is as exotic and as lush as the setting: Appleby and a small group of Commonwealthers are shipwrecked on a Pacific island inhabited by sinister archaeologists, German spies and transvestites. Although there are the usual Innesian linguistic blocks (e.g., at one point the heroine is described as "being as yet unaware of being obscurely conscious of offence"), the book is remarkably well-written, even if steeped overmuch in Freud.