Michael Innes

• Born: September 30, 1906
• Birthplace: near Edinburgh, Scotland
• Died: November 12, 1994
• Place of death: Surrey, England

Types of Plot: Police procedural; amateur sleuth; inverted; thriller; cozy

Principal Series: John Appleby, 1936-1987; Charles Honeybath, 1974-1983

Contribution

Michael Innes’s major contribution to English mystery fiction was his wonderfully tongue-in-cheek propensity for turns of phrase that prove more intriguing and delightful than his contrivances of plot. The observations of his two principal sleuths, Sir John Appleby and Charles Honeybath, offer Jamesian dialogue, extraordinary erudition, and a gently critical portrait of the English upper class. Innes’s brand of country-house skulduggery revealed his predilection for the intellectual with the sheer joy of excess. Although Innes’s mysteries incorporate elements of many subgenres, including the police procedural, amateur detection, the thriller, and the inverted mystery, they were designed first and foremost for readers who have a greater appreciation for a tour de force of words replete with scores of literary allusions than for exciting twists and turns in the action.

In a career that spanned more than a half century, Innes constantly sought to expand the boundaries of detective fiction for his readers.

Biography

Michael Innes was born John Innes Mackintosh Stewart in Edinburgh, Scotland, on September 30, 1906, the son of a professor. Educated at Edinburgh Academy and Oriel College, Oxford University, the young Innes read literature, receiving first-class honors at his graduation in 1928 and winning the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize in 1929. After spending a year abroad in Vienna, Innes received his first assignment for publication, the Nonesuch Press edition of John Florio’s translations of Montaigne’s essays, as well as an invitation to join Leeds University, Yorkshire, as a lecturer in English. He married a young medical student, Margaret Hardwick, in 1932; they had five children. In 1935, the twenty-nine-year-old Innes left Leeds to become jury professor of English at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. During the decade of his tenure there, he began to write the mysteries for which he is famous under the name Michael Innes.

On his return to the British Isles in 1946, Innes taught at Queen’s University, Belfast, until, in 1949, he became a fellow of Christ Church, Oxford. It was at this time that he began publishing nonmystery short stories and novels as J. I. M. Stewart, his real name. His academic achievements, including critical studies of Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Hardy, and William Shakespeare as well as biographies of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, generated additional honors, including an appointment as the Walker-Ames professor at the University of Washington in 1961 and an honorary doctorate from the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton in 1962. Innes died in Surrey, England, in 1994.

Analysis

Long after he had begun to enjoy fame as the mystery writer Michael Innes, an amused J. I. M. Stewart observed that it was an early English instructor’s intentionally disparaging remark that led him to try his hand at detective fiction. As a young man, he had been castigated for having the sort of imagination associated with popular rather than serious novelists. Death at the President’s Lodging (1936), renamed Seven Suspects in 1937 so as not to confuse an American audience, was written to amuse rather than to edify during Innes’s long voyage from England to Australia, where he was to spend a decade teaching students about the “important” works of literature as jury professor of English at the University of Adelaide. The rapidity with which Innes put together a whodunit replete with the Jamesian characterization, genteel setting, and literary allusions for which he continues to be known offered early promise of an extraordinarily prolific and often-distinguished career.

Death at the President’s Lodging

Even a casual glance at Death at the President’s Lodging suggests that it is not surprising that the work was published under the pseudonym Michael Innes. More than a traditional police procedural, this first novel is characterized by its humorous and often gently critical look at a variety of academic types. Those unable to appreciate adventure fiction by those of some popular reputation (as a student, Innes had been condemned for being too much like his favorite Kipling) would likely have looked askance at an academic who publicly made use of his position to satirize both his vocation and his colleagues. Sometimes criticized for its cumbersome mechanics (the plot hinges on the comings and goings of an eccentric group of dons through a minutely described academic quadrangle), Death at the President’s Lodging makes clear from the outset that Innes is primarily concerned with exploring the possibilities inherent in language itself. The novel introduces John Appleby, a Scotland Yard police officer who matures, ages, and rises in consequence along with his creator and who may be presumed to act as a voice for Innes/Stewart. Quiet and unassuming, possessing not a hint of the flamboyant, Appleby charms the well-read reader with his erudition. He in fact injects a new kind of mystery into a time-honored format. To enjoy a typical Innes mystery, a reader must be able to recognize quotations from a variety of literary sources, discover irony in the use of place names, surnames, and titles, and find pleasurable a slow pace and formalities of vocabulary and phrasing evocative of the nineteenth century. Published in its final form in 1937, as Great Britain was once again on the brink of war, Death at the President’s Lodging, as is true of most of Innes’s subsequent efforts, casts an amused eye on the narrow concerns of a select group, one that manages to remain untroubled by world turmoil.

As Innes himself acknowledged in a piece written in 1964 for Esquire, his thrillers are less topical and more understated than typical examples of the genre; indeed, they are “of the quiet Missing Masterpiece order: very British, very restrained.” Designed as entertainments, they purposefully limit a reader’s attachment to any one character and scrupulously avoid dealing directly with specific and pressing social or political concerns. Mysteries, Innes holds, are not the place to explore complex motivations and make readers aware of deep psychological truths. They ought not aim at facilitating the formation of new values or prompting the rejection of old ones. Rather, they should be a source of intellectual exercise that can be enjoyed as a process and not as a means to an end. Thus, Operation Pax (1951), praised highly for its thrillerlike characteristics, works, not because its underlying concerns are so clearly inspired by the growing nuclear menace in an increasingly divided world but because of its ability to engage an audience despite its continual lack of verisimilitude. Innes uses modern problems as a point of departure for his flights of pure fancy, not as a means to offer social or political comment. It does not matter that Innes offers no explanation for those key parts of the action that inevitably strain a reader’s credulity. He does not want his admirers to develop a new worldview, but to take pleasure in wordplay, allusions, and skillful incorporation of elements of several fiction genres.

Hamlet, Revenge!

Ultimately, the subject matter of Operation Pax and that of The Man from the Sea (1955) prove the exception rather than the rule. Innes’s detective fiction generally revolves around academics in general and the humanities in particular. In Hamlet, Revenge! (1937), the murder takes place onstage in the midst of a performance of the play most central to Innes’s own academic interests and training. The novel thus makes full use of the literary games that are in Innes’s work, making them more central to an audience’s enjoyment than the unraveling of the plot. Just as this novel’s play-within-a-play invites the careful attention to language and the literary allusions that mark Innes’s style, so do the later mystery novels that center on characters who write.

Appleby’s Answer

Appleby’s End, The New Sonia Wayward (1960), and Appleby’s Answer (1973) all feature central characters who, like Innes himself, write popular fiction. Priscilla Pringle, Sonia Wayward-cum-Colonel Folliot Petticare, and Ranulph Raven are every bit as idiosyncratic in their practice of the craft of writing as are the mad eccentrics who people those novels set in the surroundings most familiar to Innes: the university. Less self-indulgent than self-effacing, Innes’s mysteries poke gentle fun at those, like himself, who are given to intellectual circumlocution. These are not mysteries that depend on heart-stopping action. In fact, in many of Innes’s stories the mystery, murder, or theft on which everything ought to hinge is almost beside the point. For example, in Appleby’s Answer, Miss Pringle’s suspicions regarding Colonel Bulkington can never really be justified, for however villainous this would-be evildoer would like to become, he never quite achieves his aims. The petty blackmailer instead manages, just in the nick of time, to fall down a conveniently placed well before Innes has to provide his reader with a real plot. Important to note here is that Miss Pringle—perhaps an alter ego for Innes—has the same sort of overactive imagination that characterizes the melodramatic Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818). Innes’s style demands that such associations be made. His work is very genteel, very polite, very nineteenth century. The fact that Innes’s academic pursuits involve the careful exegesis of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, among others, sheds light on the origins and development of his own literary style. In Innes’s mysteries are combined the elliptical introspection inherent in a Jamesian character’s speech, the intellectual precision of a Conradian description, and the amazing coincidences that mark any one of Hardy’s plots. It is this playful application of scholarly knowledge and verbal virtuosity to a genre that pedants consider unworthy of their attention that ultimately makes Innes’s huge body of detective fiction unique.

Components of Innes’s Style

In his creation of recurring characters—the peculiarly endearing John Appleby and the aging portrait painter Charles Honeybath—Innes has left an indelible imprint on the art of mystery writing. Their turns of phrase, their observations about art, architecture, and literature, evoke for readers—somewhat critically as well as somewhat wistfully—the manners, mores, and traditions to which academics cling. The world that provides the humble detective of Death at the President’s Lodging with a knighthood, high office, and a comfortable retirement at Long Dream Manor is one in which the harsher realities of modern life scarcely ever intrude.

The world that Sir John chooses to investigate is peopled by delightfully peculiar remnants of the English aristocracy and their moneyed would-be usurpers. In this world, murder can be made fun; in this world, where, to quote Innes, “death is a parlor game,” bits of novelistic business need never be logical. Rather, they must recall and embellish an idea thought to have been “done to death” elsewhere. It is with some pride as well as with tongue in cheek that Innes, speaking of his theories of detective fiction, explains how his use of triplets in A Private View (1952) improves on the plots written around long-lost evil twins.

Innes’s pieces of detection sometimes prove to contain no mystery at all. The surprise in the early There Came Both Mist and Snow (1940) is that no one “dunit”; this novel not only plays on William Shakespeare’s comedy but also inverts the plot device of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). In Carson’s Conspiracy (1984), the extraordinary turn of events is that the imaginary son is not imaginary at all (or is he?), suggesting shades of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Such virtuosity has won for Innes a worldwide following among readers of mystery and detective fiction.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sir John Appleby first appears as a young police officer and eventually retires from the position of commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard. Erudite, he is fond of literary allusions. Seemingly staid, he has an unconventional side, as is demonstrated by his marriage to Judith Raven, a sculptor from an unorthodox literary family.
• Judith Raven Appleby first appears in Appleby’s End (1945), when a chance encounter brings John Appleby to Appleby’s End and Long Dream, the Ravens’ ancestral home. Marriage to Judith, who acts as an amateur sleuth in her own right in A Connoisseur’s Case (1962), provides John Appleby with an entrée to the English country homes that provide the settings for so many of Innes’s mysteries.
• Charles Honeybath is an aging member of the Royal Academy of the Arts whose forays into portrait painting for the aristocracy occasion the need for amateur sleuthing. Highly opinionated on the subjects of art and architecture, he may serve as a charmingly eccentric alter ego for Innes himself.

Bibliography

“Innes, Michael.” In Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, edited by Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1998. Details Innes’s contributions to detective fiction and compares his work to that of other notable authors.

Jacobs, David L. “Photo Detection: The Image as Evidence.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 1 (Fall/Winter, 1980): 18-32. Examines Innes’s representation of photography and its importance to his work.

“Michael Innes.” In Modern Mystery Writers, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Critical, scholarly examination of Innes’s work and its place in the mystery-fiction canon. Bibliographic references.

Panek, LeRoy. “The Novels of Michael Innes.” The Armchair Detective 16 (Spring, 1983): 116-130. Useful overview of Innes’s work, written for fans of the genre.

Penzler, Otto, ed. The Great Detectives. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Argues for John Appleby’s inclusion in the pantheon of literature’s great detectives.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Sheds light on Innes’s works.

Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. This important entry in the cultural studies of police and detective fiction looks at the genre both as revealing of and influencing the cultures that produce it. Provides perspective on Innes’s work. Bibliographic references and index.

Symons, Julian. “The Golden Age: The Thirties.” In Mortal Consequences: A History, from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Places Innes in a lineage of crime-fiction writers, focusing on his role in the evolution of the genre in the 1930’s.