A Night of Errors (Perennial Mystery Library) [Paperback]

Michael Innes (Author)

Book Description

Series: Perennial Mystery Library | Publication Date: June 1989

A gruelling night of shrouded motives and confused identities develops when the last of the Dromios is found murdered, with both of his hands burnt off. He was one of triplets, whose brothers had died in a fire forty years previously. Inspector Appleby wrenches the facts from a melodrama in which the final solution is written in fire.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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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: 284 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st Perennial Library ed edition (June 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060808772
• ISBN-13: 978-0060808778
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,064,536 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Burnt to a cinder in his own study, October 13, 2002

By 

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

"...So that night began and continued to the end, in nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called the Night of Errors." (Gesta Grayorum, 1594)

One of the most surreal butlers in all of mystery inhabits "Night of Errors (1948)." His name is Swindle and his conversation consists mainly of the croaked "Urrr" sound and displeasing snuffles through his nose. Most of the really amusing episodes in the book consist of Swindle's monosyllabic interactions with the long-suffering family whom he serves. Naturally, he is one of the suspects in this classical British manor house mystery.

Sir Oliver Dromio is found burnt to a crisp in his own fireplace, but this wasn't the first suspicious fire on the Dromio estate. Forty years earlier, Sir Oliver's infant brothers (he was one of a set of triplets) were supposedly burned to death in a suspect blaze in the nursery.

Sir John Appleby, recently retired from his august position at New Scotland Yard, has had his fill of burnt baronets. But he lets the local constable talk him into a midnight drive in his big yellow Bentley over to the neighboring estate of Sherris, home of the Dromio family since the seventeenth century.

There are a multitude of suspects in addition to the Neanderthal butler: Lady Dromio, whose two infant sons had died so horribly four decades past, and whose baronet husband had died mad; Lucy, her adopted daughter who might have been Sir Oliver's mistress; the Reverend Mr. Greengrave who sometimes drank a glass of wine too many, in order to overcome his shyness; Sebastian Dromio, the black sheep of the family, who was supposed to be in America; the rich, reclusive Mrs. Gollifer, who might be Lucy's natural mother; and her son, Geoffrey who is in love with Lucy.

Appleby and his sidekick, Inspector Hyland set out to solve the homicide in a night of errors compounded by several arsons, multiple corpses, mistaken identities, all sorts of motives (from blackmail to hereditary madness), and an over-full cast of suspects.

Including one very odd butler.