Product Description

Inspector Appleby is called to St Anthony's College, where the President has been murdered in his Lodging. Scandal abounds when it becomes clear that the only people with any motive to murder him are the only people who had the opportunity - because the President's Lodging opens off Orchard Ground, which is locked at night, and only the Fellows of the College have keys... 'REVIEW: 'It is quite the most accomplished first crime novel that I have read...all first-rate entertainment' (Cecil Day Lewis, Daily Telegraph) AUTHBIO: John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was born in Edinburgh, educated at Oxford, and taught English in universities all over the world. His scholarly career includes successful works on Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, but he is better known as mystery writer Michael Innes, whose legendary character, Inspector John Appleby, inspired a lasting vogue for donnish detective fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154508 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 254 pages

Customer Reviews

Introducing a New Talent
Plan of St. Anthony's College Innes' first book, introducing Inspector Appleby, and one of his best. The setting is St. Anthony's College, somewhere between Oxford and Cambridge; the victim, Dr. Umpleby, shot to death in his study surrounded by a grisly litter of bones belonging to a lunatic don. Inspector Appleby comes down from London to the college he attended, interrogates a bevy of eccentric and aged dons, is conked on the head, and strikes up a friendship with the Giles Gott of the later Hamlet, Revenge! The plot is one of Innes' best, with one of the most dazzling of all firework displays at the end. The events are extraordinary: dons rushing around in false whiskers, dead bodies carted around the university in wheelchairs, lunatic asylums, and labyrinths of false evidence. Genuine clueing and thinking, complicated time-tables, a great amount of mystification, and first-class misdirection.

Intelligent Escapism
Vintage crime novels are my guilty secret. Michael Innes is one of my favourites and Death at the President's Lodging is an excellent murder mystery full of complex clues, a tinful of red herrings and nail-biting suspense.
Later in life, Inspector Appleby gets promoted and starts to express his political views. I find him a little tiresome once he has retired from Scotland Yard when as Sir John Appleby he starts to pontificate about taxes and the poor unfortunate upper classes having to open their stately homes to the public. Mind you, despite his lecturing, Michael Innes still writes wonderfully intriguing criminal mystery stories for Appleby to solve.
In Death at the President's Lodging, Appleby is young, witty, a bit of an upstart at the Yard, able to scramble over high walls, break rules and get away with it. I'd recommend this one, and all the early novels, to everyone in need of a means to escape from the daily grind.

Enjoyable intellectual game
As an academic himself Mr Innes was at ease in the Oxbridge-type college setting for this Thirties whodunnit and his enjoyment is evident throughout. He was also something of an afficianado of the crime writing genre with frequent references to Poe, 'shockers', Sherlock Holmes, 39 Steps and 'Trents Last Case'. His main love is the 'locked room' mystery which gets a plug as early as page 6 and this is fostered by his ongoing description of the college as a 'submarine'; no way in or out for the murderer!

The book has the feeling of a Victorian stage play from the outset. Our hero in this extensive series is Inspector Appleby of the Yard who refers to 'the elaborately constructed stage' for the murder scene and to 'that gruesome decor' for the corpse. Meanwhile the gruff, dogged local policeman Dodd, prefers the blunter 'livestock' as his description of the elite intelligentsia who make up the dramatis personae.

Mr Innes was surely using Appleby as his voice stating that the whole investigation was,'a frankly enjoyable intellectual game' whilst Dodd gets on with the 'rough work'.

Unfortunately for me this is just not my type of crime writing. Mr Innes revels in the cast list of suspects, the motives, the opportunites, the alibis and the red herrings. 'A red herring may be a rat with a deceptive fish-like smell', is a line worth a star on its own! Regrettably I felt that I needed an Excel spreadsheet by the end. In other words the problem solving had overtaken the novel. Lots of people love this type of crime writing and, for them, this book is strongly recommended.