A Private View (Inspector Appleby Mystery S.) [Paperback]

Michael Innes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2008 | Series: Inspector Appleby Mystery S.

Sir John and Lady Appleby attend a memorial exhibition of the oils, gouaches, collages and trouvailles of artist Gavin Limbert, who was recently found shot, under very suspicious circumstances. As Assistant Commissioner of Police, Sir John is already interested, but he becomes even more intrigued when Limbert's last masterpiece is stolen from the gallery under his very eyes.

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 (September 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842327526
• ISBN-13: 978-1842327524
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,382,737 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 Alternate Title: One Man Show, September 8, 2002

By 

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

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (pseudonym Michael Innes) was born in 1906 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, and his mysteries reflect both his scholarship, and the year he spent in Vienna, studying Freudian psychoanalysis.

"A Private View" (1952), also titled "One Man Show" is later Appleby. Sir John has already been knighted and married, and has worked his way up to the position of Assistant Commissioner at New Scotland Yard. He and his wife, Lady Judith (a sculptress by profession) play equal roles in solving the double mystery of who murdered the young artist, Gavin Limbert, and who stole two very famous paintings from the Duke of Horton's estate. (The Duke also plays a prominent role in the early Appleby mystery, "Hamlet, Revenge!" (1937).)

This story begins when Lady Judith drags her unsuspecting husband off to a memorial exhibition of the works of Gavin Limbert, a young artist who was thought to have committed suicide. When Limbert's `chef d'oeuvre' is stolen from the gallery, right under Appleby's nose, he feels compelled to reopen the case on the painter's mysterious demise.

Appleby's assistant, Inspector Cadover is already acquainted with the case and he serves as a stiff upper-lip to his chief's intuitive, sometimes playful method of investigation. When Appleby disappears after a nocturnal ruckus in a junk shop, Cadover takes over the case and brings it to a successful conclusion---just as he later takes on Appleby's role at New Scotland Yard after Sir John's retirement (for more about Cadover, read "The Case of the Journeying Boy" by Michael Innes (1949).)

This particular Appleby is an equal mixture of mystery and adventure---Appleby personally engages the villains in glorious, but somewhat ignominious battle; Judith hides in a closet and overhears an artist plotting murder, etc. There is a wonderful chase scene that ends when Lady Judith and the Duke of Horton save Appleby from a particularly appalling fate.

Don't let the author's gift for playful, erudite dialogue disguise his mastery of character. "A Private View" contains a portrait of an amnesiac young woman that is probably the most sensitive and believable in all of mystery literature (eat your heart out, Dame Agatha!)