Private View, a [Import] [Hardcover]

Michael Innes (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Gollancz; First Edition edition (January 1, 1952)
• ASIN: B0000CI76E
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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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!)