Customer Reviews

Appleby and Honeybath

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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.