FFB: Appleby's End

Michael Innes was the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (1906-1994), an English professor and lecturer at various times in Leeds, Adelaide, Australia, Belfast, and Oxford. He also studied Freudian psychoanalysis for a year in Vienna. Although he wrote novels and books of criticism and essays under his own name, he's best known in the crime fiction community for his detective novels written under the Michael Innes name, primarily his 40 novels and numerous short stories featuring Detective Inspector John Appleby of Scotland Yard, a well-educated man from humble origins who eventually ends up as Commissioner and later Sir John, retired.

His Appleby novels are filled with humor, eccentricity and an air of the fantastic, with a little bit of detecting thrown in for good measure. You probably won't get Appleby confused with the more realistic PD James creation, Inspector Dalgleish, another literate Yard detective. If you happen to have a Ph.D in English literature and ancient mythology, you'll probably feel right at home with the many literary allusions Innes uses, although he himself once referred to these books as mere "entertainments," and "I would describe some of them as on the frontier between the detective story and the fantasy: they have a somewhat 'literary' flavor but their values remain those of melodrama and not of fiction proper."

The novel Appleby's End from 1945 is taken from the name of the train station where the Detective Inspector gets off the train, which sets off a string of coincidences, most based on stories by Ranulph Raven — the same Raven whose mysterious descendants were the ones who invited Appleby to spend the night at their house. One descendant in particular, Judith Raven, catches Appleby's eye and interest after he floats down an icy river on top of a carriage with her and spends part of the night with her in a haystack during a snowstorm. At first the Raven stories-come-to-life seem like pranks — from animals replaced by marble effigies, to someone received a tombstone telling him when he would die — until a servant is found dead buried up to his neck in snow.

Innes's humor is evident here with place names such as the old manorhouse called Dream and the nearby villages titled Abbot's Yatter, Boxer's Bottom, Linger, Sleeps Hill, Sneak and Snarl. Then there are the character names:  Billy Bidewell, Gregory Grope, Hannah Hoobin. There are also touches of what became his almost cliched use of past-their-prime aristocrats in crumbling country manor homes. As for the obscure references, here are a couple of examples:

"A fleeting and hebdomadal mythology called into action by the obscurely working but infinitely potent creativity of the folk. In the green Arcadian valleys Pan is dead but still a numerous Panisci lurk and follow in the parks. ... The rape of Prosperpin - gathering flowers, herself a fairer flower - continues still, and Dis's wagon is a borrowed limousine."

and

"Ranulph's third brother, Adolphus, a person of some talent who had joined the Romish Communion and become a bishop in partibus, but who was later converted on his deathbed to the religious system of the Zend-Avesta"

and

"A companion piece [to the Rape of Europa], in which a bull and a glossy lady were yet more inextricably entangled both with each other and with two astoundingly contorted young men, Appleby identified provisionally as a Punishment of Dirce. He was looking round with some apprehension for a Pasaphae ... "

(There use to be an online annotated list online to help you keep things straightened out, but alas, that website appears to be no more.) The New York Herald Tribune paid Innes an appropriate compliment, to wit:  "Mr. Innes is the most adeptly and allusively elephantine wit presently committed to the English language."

Appleby's End may not be the type of detective novel you turn to when you're in the mood for something gritty or true-to-life, but if you want some escapism in the vein of what Lewis Carroll might have penned had he turned his hand to crime fiction, then this is a nice trip down the rabbit hole.

One interesting publication note: In March 2010, Crippen & Landru released Appleby Talks About Crime, 18 previously uncollected stories, many told by Appleby himself to the fictional six-member Mystery Club.

Comments

[George Kelley]

I've read a few Appleby mysteries and enjoyed them all. I read APPLEBY'S END years ago and dimly recall parts of it as I read your fine review. I'll have to dig out an APPLEBY I haven't read yet for a future FFB.

[BV Lawson]

Fun books, for sure! Will look forward to reading your upcoming FFB on the author. :-)