Book Description
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.
About the Author
Born in Edinburgh , John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was educated at Oriel College, Oxford.
After graduation he went to Vienna, to study Freudian psychoanalysis for a year.
His first book, an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne, got him a lectureship at the University of Leeds. In later years he taught at the universities of Adelaide, Belfast and Oxford.
Under his pseudonym, Michael Innes, he wrote a highly successful series of mystery stories. His most famous character is Inspector John Appleby, who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this day. His other well-known character is Honeybath, the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in The Mysterious Commission, in 1975. Stewart's last novel, Appleby and the Ospreys, appeared in 1986.