When I was twelve, I started running out of Agatha Christie
books to read. This meant two things: first, I would have to ration the
remaining dozen or so, and, second, in order to ration them I would have to
find other great writers to enjoy. To date, I’ve not found anyone who can give
me the same thing Christie does, although I was perfectly happy juggling Ngaio Marsh for plot and Iris Murdoch for psychology in
my late teens.
Anyway, I consulted the lovely Book People. This was the olden days
of 2002 so the internet was not very glorious and I ordered some books from a
glossy brochure. It was a set of five ‘classic crime’ books by Penguin,
sampling five classic writers: Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Edmund
Crispin, Josephine Tey, and Michael Innes. I read Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke and thought it
was okay. Likewise, Tey’s The Franchise
Affair (rereading a few years ago, I updated my verdict to AWESOME). I was
already a Crispin fan so found The Moving
Toyshop predictably wonderful. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown disappointed me, which the Father
Brown stories continue to do. There was only one book in the set that I couldn’t
read: Death at the President’s Lodging (1936)
by Michael Innes.
Time and again, I tried. But it was so dull. The prose was so smug and referential and the characters were
so uninteresting that I couldn’t get into it. This was particularly unfortunate
because, thinking from the title that it was a political thriller, I’d elected
to do a school project on the book! For years I thought that Michael Innes was
only good for one thing: teaching me how to skim the pages of a book and talk
about it without having read it.
Then, at 19, in a particularly dark time of my life, I picked
up at random an old copy of Hare Sitting
Up, a very different Innes novel, and I loved it. I couldn’t believe that
this was the same writer. It never occurred
that I was simply too young to understand Death
at the President’s Lodging the first time.
A few weeks ago, a helpful friend informed me that I read
boring books. This immediately made me think of Death at the President’s Lodging, so I sought it out and opened it
up. And I read. And read. And read.
This book was Innes’s debut, and the pilot for his detective
John Appleby’s five-decade career. It’s a witty and sophisticated whodunit that
positively revels in its artificiality. The set-up is this: the president of a
university college has been found murdered, and around his body are piles of
human bones. It’s not quite a
locked-room mystery, but rather a locked-community one because the president’s
lodgings are in a sequestered part of the college, only accessible to a select
few dons. I say ‘locked community’ rather than ‘closed community’ because Innes
does a fantastic job of showcasing academia in ridiculous and resolute isolation
from the real world.
It’s this isolation, this absolute silliness of the
community about which Innes writes, that makes his solution work. On the face
of it, the final chapter is ludicrous beyond parody, but the author sets it up
so well, and with such unreality, that it makes perfect sense. Innes was, of
course, a pseudonym for James Innes Mackintosh (J.I.M.) Stewart (1906-1994), a
widely-travelled Oxford don.
There are seven suspects in this mystery, and each man is
implicated by an embarrassment of clues. It’s up to Inspector Appleby to sift
the real from the contrived:
[I]n the network of physical circumscriptions implicitly pointing […] to so-and-so there was contrivance in a literary tradition deriving from all the progeny of Sherlock Holmes, while in the fantasy of the bones there was something of the incongruous tradition of the ‘shocker.’ Somewhere in the case, it seemed, there was a mind thinking in terms both of inference and of the macabre. … A mind, one might say, thinking in terms of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, come to think of it, was a present intellectual fashion, and St Anthony’s was an intellectual place. …
I love it when crime fiction does this. What I didn’t love
so much was the smugness of Appleby’s many literary references, or the fact
that beyond occasionally quoting someone learned, he has no discernible
personality. From what I have read, Future Appleby never gets decently
characterised, although he does go on in later books to acquire a wife, a
daughter, a promotion, and a retirement package.
Death at the President’s
Lodging has a bit of a first-novel-vibe to it, but, that said, it’s a bloody
good debut.
