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Hamlet, Revenge! (Penguin Crime Fiction)

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This classical suspense novel, first published in 1937 might be difficult to follow for readers who are not already familiar with Shakespeare's "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince Denmark."

However, it is well worth reading, not only for the richly allusive mystery, but also for the characters who create and act out its tragedy. The author engraves his brittle, upper-class English in diamond-point prose. He etches their wit with acid. They are never dull. To misquote the Bard himself, "Age cannot wither Innes's characters, nor murder stale their witty dialogue."

For the length of the tragedy at least, the reader will inhabit the manor and precincts of Scamnum Court, principal seat of the Duke of Horton---"It is a big place: two counties away it has a sort of little brother in Blenheim Palace."

After the second murder of the evening, C.I.D. Inspector John Appleby gives the reader his impression of the place, while searching through its corridors for the Duchess of Horton:

"Moving about Scamnum at night, it seemed to Appleby, was like moving in a dream through some monstrously overgrown issue of 'Country Life.' Great cubes of space, disconcertingly indeterminate in function--- were they rooms or passages? ---flowed past in the half-darkness with the intermittent coherence of distant music, now composed into order and proportion, now a vague and raw material for the architectonics of the imagination...He recalled the great palaces --- now for the most part tenantless --- which the eighteenth century had seen rise, all weirdly of a piece, about Europe. Scamnum, he knew, was to be a different pattern; would reveal itself in the morning as being --- however augustly --- the home of an English gentleman and a familiar being. But now it was less a human dwelling than a dream-symbol of centuries of rule, a fantasy created from the tribute of ten thousand cottages long perished from the land."

Everything in "Hamlet, Revenge!" is done on a grand scale. The Duchess of Horton persuades her old friend, the Lord Chancellor of England to act the part of Polonius in her amateur production of "Hamlet." Her husband is cast as Claudius, King of Denmark and she herself plays his Queen. Their daughter, Elizabeth is Ophelia. The greatest Shakespearean actor of the day plays the Melancholy Dane.

All of the play's characters are put on edge by a series of mysterious messages, culminating in a quotation from "Macbeth", "...there shall be done a deed of dreadful note..." Then the Lord Chancellor is shot to death at the very instant in the play when his character is supposed to die by Hamlet's sword.

Appleby is called in to solve a murder that "was planned, deliberately and at obvious risk, to take place bang in the middle of a private performance of Hamlet."

The young C.I.D. Inspector is also charged with recovering vital State documents that the second-most important figure in British government had with him when he motored down to Scamnum Court to strut and fret upon the ducal stage. Until the very end of "Hamlet, Revenge!" the reader can never be sure if he or she is reading a murder mystery or a spy story.

"Hamlet, Revenge!" in my opinion is one of the top ten mysteries of the last century, reaching the same rarified heights as Sayers's "The Nine Tailors." It is much less known to American readers, possibly because of its author's richly allusive style. Innes was a Student of Christ Church, Oxford, from 1949 until his retirement in 1973. He was a Lecturer in English, and he did not talk down to readers of his detective fiction. Either they were familiar with the Bard, or they would miss out on half the enjoyment of "Hamlet, Revenge!"

In the course of a long career (unfortunately little-known in this country), Michael Innes's Inspector John Appleby went from being a bachelor and a relatively junior Scotland Yard inspector to a happily-married Chief Inspector Sir John Appleby. These were the decades that Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and Allingham's Albert Campion were going through similar odysseys, and, like them, his creator uses them not only to tell stories but to interject comments on the state of England and the British during the years between 1935 and the late 1950s. "Hamlet, Revenge!" may have been Innes's best story, however, in spite of being early in his career. That's assuming that you're familiar with Shakespeare (Innes apparently expected that any 'educated' person would be), that you're not one of those likely to be offended by the focus on the British aristocracy as it was just beginning its downwards spiral, and that you share a preference for dry British "donnish" humor over slapstick.

Innes's book is also a comedy of manners that plays on the way certain social classes and/or professions seem odd to those not familiar with them. The cast of characters is a memorable one, from the Duke of Horton himself (apparently one of England's pre-eminent non-royal peers) to his assertive Scottish head gardener and his peculiar and reclusive major-domo Mr. Rauth, to American philologist Dr. Bunney, who specializes in getting people to speak into his dictaphone so he can analyze their speech patterns, virtually all the thirty-odd characters are carefully-wrought studies who show up as individuals. The one exception, and it is lamentable, is the Duke's attractive twenty-one-year-old daughter Elizabeth. In spite of the delightfully naughty way in which she throws a couple of murderous pursuers off her trail at the book's end, it is not totally clear why Appleby's Dr. Watson, Giles Gott (who showed up as a suspect in an earlier Innes book, "Murder at the President's Lodging") is so much in love with her -- like Ophelia herself, she comes across as rather pallid if undeniably brainy. However, something occurred to me while reading the book: if Lady Elizabeth was, as the text suggests, studying Old and Middle English at Oxford's Somerville College at the time of the story (apparently 1935-36), she almost certainly would have been pursuing them under the guidance of a middle-aged don named J.R.R. Tolkien!