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…

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #581285 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 254 pages

Review
"It is quite the most accomplished first crime novel that I have read…all first-rate entertainment" -- Cecil Day Lewis, The Daily Telegraph

About the Author
Born in Edinburgh , John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was educated at Oriel College, Oxford.

After graduation he went to Vienna, to study Freudian psychoanalysis for a year.

His first book, an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne, got him a lectureship at the University of Leeds. In later years he taught at the universities of Adelaide, Belfast and Oxford.

Under his pseudonym, Michael Innes, he wrote a highly successful series of mystery stories. His most famous character is Inspector John Appleby, who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this day. His other well-known character is Honeybath, the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in The Mysterious Commission, in 1975. Stewart's last novel, Appleby and the Ospreys, appeared in 1986.

Customer Reviews

Alternate title: Seven Suspects
My favorite Inspector Appleby mysteries take place in an academic setting. This subset of his mystery novels is undoubtedly a byproduct of the many years that Michael Innes (whose real name was John Innes Mackintosh Stewart) spent laboring in the halls of academia. Among the seats of learning where he taught are Queen's University in Belfast, and the universities of Oxford, Adelaide, and Leeds.

The author could not help but involve a legion of eccentric, pompous, and even murderous professors in the death of the president of St. Anthony's College (modeled after the colleges at Oxford University). Their academic spats and bumblings are a good part of what makes this book readable. Innes is wickedly funny when it comes to poking fun at the habits of his donnish colleagues and undergraduates.

"Death at the President's Lodging" starts out as a locked room mystery where the only suspects are locked into the college grounds for the night. The president's body is found in his own library, but we gradually learn that the corpse was subject to a great deal of postmortem perambulation as his colleagues try to establish their own alibis and manufacture evidence that points to their academic enemies. Nothing is as it first seems, not even time of death.

A trio of undergraduates provides the comic relief as they chase one of the suspects (supposedly at an archeological dig in the Middle East) across the English countryside and finally deliver him to Inspector Appleby in a large wicker clothes basket (shades of Falstaff!).

As Inspector Appleby winds his way through the skeins of plot and counter-plot created by great intellects gone murderously askew, his intuition is played off against the rather unimaginative plodding of local Constable Dodd. Dodd is a bit of a dry stick compared to the irrepressible Appleby, who in his very first appearance in this mystery (published in 1936), is already showing signs of what his successor at Scotland Yard refers to as his 'waywardness.'

Enjoy Inspector John Appleby's literary debut for the hijinks of the undergraduates, the plots and counter-plots of their devious professors, and the erudite style of their donnish creator. The plot is overly complex, but it is brilliantly resolved and a lot of fun to read.

Innes and Appleby shine
Innes starts with an observation of Dr. Johnson `an academic life puts one little in the way of extraordinary causalities", but the academics at St Anthony College and Inspector Appleby find them self immediate in the middle of it, with the murder of their president. This mythical college between Oxford and Cambridge presents a classic "submarine" (locked room) crime scene - a closed community with just 10 keys limited accesses. Along the way Appleby meets an odd assortment of professors, who confront there own moral dilemmas and Kant's question of when is it ok to lie. Despite a thump on the head and many misdirections along the way Appleby does solve it. First published in 1936, there are some few period notes such as using coal to head, and the start of the phone system at the college

Pushing at the limits of Golden Age detective fiction.
Had Borges ever read this classic detective novel? I'm not suggesting Innes bursts the boundaries of his form like Borges or Chesterton. On its most obvious level, this is a typical product of Golden Age detective fiction - conservative, obviously ideological, a puzzle-like mystery solved by a socially and intellectually superior detective, archly written, set in a socially acceptable milieu (an Oxbridge college) full of the right people, with amusing instances of outright snobbery. But if he doesn't burst his genre's limits, Innes certainly seems to nag at them. Because, in his almost complete abstraction of plot to the exclusion of meaningful character or locale ; in his filtering of third person objective narration with the voices of the narrated; in his continual self-referentiality; in his meaningful allusinism which both focuses on the genre, but also well away from it; in, most importantly, casting doubt on his detective hero and offering a very unsatisfactory solution, Innes seems to be edging towards a position that would allow Borges to launch his metaphysical fantasies, thus undermining the very fundamentals of the genre he's working in.