Appleby and Honeybath [Paperback]

Michael Innes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 4, 1984

Every English mansion has a locked room, and Grinton Hall is no exception - the library has hidden doors and passages...and a corpse. But when the corpse goes missing, Sir John Appleby and Charles Honeybath have an even more perplexing case on their hands - just how did it disappear when the doors and windows were securely locked? A bevy of helpful houseguests offer endless assistance, but the two detectives suspect that they are concealing vital information. Could the treasures on the library shelves be so valuable that someone would murder for them?

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Expect vintage ingenuity, well-tempered jokes, unruffled prose. You'll be undisappointed' -- The Times --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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 alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 4, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140073078
• ISBN-13: 978-0140073072
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,928,252 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Hellish dark and smells of cheese.", July 15, 2004

By 

E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Appleby and Honeybath (Hardcover)

What could possibly be more appealing to Michael Innes's two literate detectives, Charles Honeybath the painter and Sir John Appleby, retired Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), than a forbidden library? Its owner, Squire Grinton hates books and there is an unspoken understanding that his library is off-limits to his guests.

Honeybath is poking about Grinton, searching for a background against which to paint the squire. He has decided to paint Terence Grinton in his hunting pinks, but has also made it clear that adding a horse to the portrait would be very expensive. "With a favourite groom thrown in it would be classifiable as a conversation piece, and so cost the earth." It is at this point in the decision-making process (no groom no horse) that Honeybath, member of the Royal Academy and portrait painter to Peers of the Realm wanders into the forbidden library.

Naturally he finds a dead body. Most especially Honeybath notes its expression of malign glee. He locks up the library and returns with his friend, Sir John Appleby.

The body is gone and there is a smell of toasted cheese wafting through the stale air of the library.

Corpses don't scamper off, not even in Michael Innes's most surreal novels and "Honeybath and Appleby" is just a pleasant locked-room mystery with a manor house full of eccentric suspects, including its book-hating squire. There is also an autodidactic butler, a shady son-in-law, various antique professors, a long-lost satire from the pen of Alexander Pope, and a phony medium who goes about clasping her bosom and proclaiming, "Woe to profane inquirers into forbidden things."

Indeed. Spend a pleasant evening in your library reading this minor but enjoyable Innes.