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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gamesome twins in a Cold War melodrama, May 20, 2004
Almost every author worth his or her salt has had fun with the switched twins plot, from William Shakespeare to Georgette Heyer. In "Hare Sitting Up" (1959), Michael Innes creates two twins who like to play the 'which twin am I' game with their friends---not so much as they used to though, as the Juniper twins have respectable professions now: one is the head of a boys' school; the other is a scientist whose field of expertise is biological warfare. When the biological warfare scientist goes missing, Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) is called onto the case by the highest political powers in the realm. It seems that a deadly bacteriological culture has also gone missing along with Howard Juniper. Once the author has this rather far-fetched plot set up to his satisfaction, his readers are treated to an extended visit to a boys' school, to the decaying mansion of a duck-banding peer, and to the grim, 'prohibited' island of Arday off the coast of Scotland. This novel is a smoothly blended combination of thriller and manor house mystery. One of the antagonists is standard-grade evil, and Innes doesn't spend too much ink on him. The other is truly mad, after a character in D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love:" "You yourself, don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?" H.R.F. Keating in his 1987 book, "Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books," has this to say about our literate Commissioner of Metropolitan Police: "To Appleby one could well apply the words which Michael Innes, writing under his own name [J.I.M. Stewart] in the novella "The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories," employs to describe that hero: 'He loved tumbling out scraps of poetry from a ragbag collection in his mind - and particularly in absurd and extravagant contexts.' " Sir John is in true form in this melodramatic Cold War mystery.
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by Michael Innes
by Michael Innes
by Michael Innes
by Michael Innes
by Michael Innes
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