The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards [Edwards, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-06-04T07:00:00+00:00

Death at the President’s Lodging

by Michael Innes (1936)

‘An academic life, Dr Johnson observed, puts one little in the way of extraordinary casualties. This was not the experience of the Fellows and scholars of St Anthony’s College when they awoke one raw November morning to find their President, Josiah Umpleby, murdered in the night. The crime was at once intriguing and bizarre, efficient and theatrical. It was efficient, because nobody knew who had committed it. And it was theatrical because of a macabre and unnecessary act of fantasy with which the criminal, it was quickly rumoured, had accompanied his deed.’

Michael Innes announced his arrival as a detective novelist characteristically, with a quotation, a paradox, a baroque scenario and a touch of humour. Umpleby has been shot, little piles of human bones have been scattered around his corpse, and on the oak panels of his study, someone has chalked a couple of grinning death’s heads.

The puzzle is too much for the capable but unimaginative local policeman, and Inspector John Appleby of New Scotland Yard is summoned. There is ‘something more in Appleby than the intensely taught product of a modern police college. A contemplative habit and a tentative mind, poise as well as force, reserve rather than wariness—these were the tokens perhaps of some underlying more liberal education.’ He prefers to solve problems ‘on a human or psychological plane’ rather than by focusing on the practicalities of ‘doors and windows and purloined keys.’

We are left in no doubt that Appleby is a ‘gentleman’, and suspicion shifts around a closed circle of college men (no woman plays a significant part in the story); in the US, to avoid any hint of infamy at the White House, the book was re-titled Seven Suspects. Although part of a fictitious university located at Bletchley, St Anthony’s, the erudition, playfulness and petty jealousies of college life are evoked so well because the author was a consummate Oxford insider. Appleby finally reveals all in the suitable setting of the college common room, although naturally he waits until after port and sherry have circulated around the assembled Fellows.

Michael Innes was a pen-name taken by John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who studied at Oriel College and later returned to Oxford to become a student (i.e. Fellow) at Christ Church. In the mid-Thirties, as he said in his memoir Myself and Michael Innes (1987), ‘in one class of polite society, writing detective stories had superseded writing ghost stories as an acceptable relaxation’, and he began the novel ‘with the notion of its bringing in a little pocket-money’. In much the same spirit Cecil Day-Lewis, another Oxford man, had written his first detective story under the name Nicholas Blake to fund the repair of a leaky roof.

Appleby and his creator enjoyed long careers. Innes’ work included several thrillers, and sometimes verged on the fantastic, as with The Daffodil Affair (1942), while he became equally prolific as a writer of ‘straight’ novels and non-fiction under his own name. Sounding a little defensive, he

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