Innes, Michael - Appleby's End (1945)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

“A series of odd happenings, linked together in rather a complicated way by an obscure and rather literary thread, a booksy thread…”

This is very funny nonsense. It bears the same relation to the rest of crime fiction (or even to the world of Hamlet, Revenge!) that Patience or The Mikado do to Don Giovanni or Semiramide. For that is what the book is: a comic opera, nothing more. So we have villages called Drool, Sneak, Snarl and Yatter (c.f. Cold Comfort Farm’s Howling), a ghastly family of eccentrics towered over by the long-dead intellects of literary relatives; we have rural passions, secret heirs and illegitimate children (by legal marriage); we have an outbreak of witchcraft and sorcery; and, most strikingly, we have cows, dogs and pigs turning into marble statues. Very improbable, but very funny.

Appleby's End is the name of a train station in Cold Comfort Farm territory (the local villages are Yatter, Sneak, Snarl, Drool, Boxer's Bottom, and Linger). Lots of rural inbreeding, pig rustling, and strange people. A quintessential Innes, and Appleby meets his future wife Judith Raven in this. Nice bit about floating down the river in a carriage, in a snowstorm, and huddling in a haystack. Fantastic events but a nice change from some of the previous bizarre fantasies. Back on track again at the end of the War. Interesting story too, but not really a murder mystery per se. The motive for the crimes is excellent. (Hints that Appleby is going to retire from the police and become a farmer -- indeed, next couple of books don't have him -- but Innes later changed his mind.)

Wyatt James