Famous writer, Richard Eliot, has written numerous detective novels, featuring 'The Spider', a daring, clever criminal in earlier books, and an equally canny private investigator in later ones. But when he comes to life - first to burgle an odd neighbour, then to harass the Eliot family, and finally to attend his own 'birthday party' - Inspector John Appleby is sent to investigate.
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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.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Also known as "The Spider Strikes",
By E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Stop Press (Inspector Appleby Mystery S.) (Paperback)
"Stop Press" (1939), the fourth Detective Appleby mystery is basically a British comedy of manners wrapped inside a thriller about international arms dealers, enclosed in a whodunit that Mary Roberts Rineheart would have been proud to acknowledge. In fact if a mysterious prankster called the Spider is substituted for Rineheart's Bat---well, Innes adds unique touches of his own to a weekend in the British countryside gone awry.
Popular author, Richard Eliot, has written numerous detective novels, featuring 'The Spider', a daring, clever criminal in earlier books, and an equally clever private investigator in later ones. But when the Spider comes to life--first to burgle an eccentric neighbor, then to harass the author's family, and finally to attend his own birthday party-- Inspector John Appleby is called up from London by his sister (I believe this is the only Appleby novel in which she appears) to discover the fictional creature's mundane identity. Inspector Appleby makes a dramatic entry into Rust Hall during a mysteriously contrived black-out and begins to sort out a very large cast of characters, including a psychiatrist, a growling ghost writer, feuding Oxford professors, Eliot's publisher, an actor, a ne'er-do-well brother, a herd of pigs, an art-collecting arms-dealer--well, the list goes on and on. I had to read "Stop Press" twice in order to fix its dramatis personae firmly in mind. It's not the best Appleby novel but it is certainly the most complex. The mystery itself is cluttered with subplots, and the solution is rather contrived. Read "Stop Press" for its slowly building atmosphere of terror. Rust Hall and later, Shoon Abbey are lovingly detailed architectural monstrosities that serve as the brooding lairs of The Spider. One might even categorize this novel as 'Early Appleby Gothic.'
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
death by dons,
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This review is from: Stop Press (Inspector Appleby Mystery S.) (Paperback)
In my opinion the finest example of the classical English detective story ( even if it is written by a Scotsman ). Crusty Oxford dons ( as told by one them ); two country house parties, not just one; endless complexities of plot; malicious academic verbal fencing... and of course a sufficiency of corpses. Lovely stuff if it's your period.
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