An Awkward Lie (Inspector Appleby Mystery S.) [Paperback]

Michael Innes (Author)

Book Description

Series: Inspector Appleby Mystery S. | Publication Date: January 2001

Sir John Appleby's son, Bobby, assumes his father's detective role in this baffling crime. When Bobby finds a dead man, in a bunker on a golf course, he notices something rather strange - the first finger of the man's right hand is missing. A young girl approaches the scene and offers to watch the body while Bobby goes for help, but when he returns with the police in tow, the body and the girl are missing.

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: 180 pages
• Publisher: House of Stratus (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842327240
• ISBN-13: 978-1842327241
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 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: #2,220,412 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A mystery starring Inspector Appleby's son, Bobby, November 29, 2009

By 

E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Awkward Lie (Inspector Appleby Mystery S.) (Paperback)

Michael Innes wrote some of his best, most easily flowing suspense novels starring highly educated young men, and "An Awkward Lie" (1971) just happens to be about his famous serial detective Sir John Appleby's son, Robert Appleby "(successful scrum-half retired, and author of that notable anti-novel `The Lumber Room')." Innes' young men are uniformly intelligent (one might even say intellectually arrogant), intrepid, and high-spirited. They tend to actively seek adventure rather than waiting for adventure to stumble over them---although, in "An Awkward Lie" Bobby Appleby does the stumbling---over a body on a golf course.

He and a strange young woman both come upon a murdered man in a sand trap, and she agrees to stay put while Bobby runs off to phone the police. When Bobby and the police return to the crime scene, both the young woman and the body have disappeared.

Bobby's blood is up. He had taken a liking to the young woman, and believes her to be kidnapped by the same criminals who stole the body. He also thinks he might have recognized the corpse as one of his former middle school teachers. So, off he goes with hardly a word to the police, or his famous detective-father.

This rather ordinary (for Michael Innes) detective-thriller is notable for two scenes: the first where Bobby attempts to declare his affection for the young woman he met on the golf course, amidst the gigantic pipes of his school's antique septic system; the second occurs on the moonlit downs near the school, as Bobby and his new love close in on the bad guys, who are hiding out in an archeological excavation of an Iron Age chieftain's barrow.

Michael Innes is one of the finest, most unjustly neglected authors from the British Golden Age of Mystery. If you haven't already discovered him, try starting with The Case of the Journeying Boy, or his very literate Appleby mystery, Hamlet, Revenge! (Inspector Appleby Mystery).