Appleby Talks Again (Inspector Appleby Mysteries) [Paperback]

Michael Innes (Author)

Book Description

Series: Inspector Appleby Mysteries | Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Ralph Dangerfield, an Edwardian playwright who belonged to the smartest young set of his day, kept a scandalous diary recording the intimate details of his own life and those of his friends. After his death, it was believed that his mother had burnt the incriminating evidence, but fifty years later, a famous collector of literary curiosities claims to have the diary in his possession and threatens to blackmail fashionable London with belated secrets about people now in respectable old age. Sir John Appleby reveals how he uncovered this unscrupulous crime and talks about his key role in seventeen more intriguing cases.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 198 pages
• Publisher: House of Stratus (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842327232
• ISBN-13: 978-1842327234
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,035,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sir John Appleby in shorts, March 11, 2004

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E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Appleby Talks Again (Textbook Binding)

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