Customer Reviews

the spider strikes

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This "macabre and crazy comedy" is a staggering tour de force-"a huge and improbable fantasy from top to bottom", "very complicated and very closely knit. It is a long time since I enjoyed anything so much." That said, the book is perhaps not to everybody's taste, for, in this day and age of mindless sensationalism, who has time to read a book three times as long as the normal detective story, full of literary allusions, and with a wit and style all its own? Those who do miss out, however, will be missing something, for this is one of the half-dozen best detective stories I have ever read.

The most noticeable thing about the book, apart from the extraordinary length, is the original idea at the core of the novel, the idea which is "just the sort that such books should have-something imaginatively convincing but not actually possible": the intrusion of the Spider into reality, escaping from the books of Mr. Richard Eliot into the books of Mr. Michael Innes, "the effect as if the inanimate-seeming husk of [Mr. Eliot's] books had trembled and cracked-and from the chrysalis there had struggled a living thing." This gimmick of "our own imaginings, our own stock-in-trade, being brought to bear against us" is completely unusual in detective fiction (although Innes would reuse it in Appleby's End and in Appleby's Answer)-and is completely successful, for the atmosphere created by a house "echoing to ambiguous sounds, to ditties of no tone which had existed hitherto only in the silent paraphrase of print" is memorable stuff. Allied to this is the fascinating (and original) impossible "crime": how can the perpetrator of the deeds know of Eliot's discarded, unspoken, and unwritten ideas? The play with the discarded ideas-medical hypnosis, telepathy, paramnesia, and metaphysics-is ingenious and well-sustained.

The plot itself is excellent, both highly complicated and lucid. "Plots don't ramify; they thicken. This plot thickens. To an improbable, fatiguing Eliot-Spideresque degree." Innes keeps his balls in the air like a master juggler, continually posing challenges and riddles-and the reader, far from being fatigued, enjoys the entire farce.

The atmosphere is effectively menacing in an original way. Unlike many stories where the reader spends the book impatient for the victim to be bumped off, the minor outrages create a feeling that "something is being worked up to. A bastard artistic process. And we haven't reached the climax yet."-but that when the climax is reached, something dreadful is going to occur. The later revelation that somebody is going to be a murderer, and somebody else a victim, allows for more complications and ingenuity, for Innes repeatedly poses the question of who victim and villain will be. Suffice it to say that the reader will be unable to work out the puzzle, despite the fine clues provided.

The writing is flawless-no, better, it is simultaneously brilliant and perfect. The literary wit could not be improved upon, even if most of the story seems to be taken up by a long series of highly entertaining digressions; the book is hilarious, and "the comedy [is] of the classical sort which is based on character", with Innes' characterisation equally flawless. The bookishness is, as Innes points out, not a handicap-"rather it helped him to a useful critical control of the magic carpet, so that his contraptions of the sort flow straighter and cleaner than most. And it gave him from the start a good deal of craft. He had pondered Gulliver's Travels and knew that the best way to pass off an improbability is to set another improbability hard up against it."

And, although the book is certainly improbable, it is such sheer delight that only a realist would complain.

"The Spider Strikes" (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 "The Spider Strikes" 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 "The Spider Strikes" 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.'