Innes, Michael - Death at the President's Lodging / Seven Suspects (1936)

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

An extraordinary work by any standards, and arguably the best début of any writer. Innes impresses immediately by being truly intellectual, but not in an oppressive or pretentious manner: post-structuralism and structuralism (although some decades before their invention) are worked in very neatly, with much discussion of the blurring of the barrier between artificiality and reality (Innes is, of course, the author who appealed to Borges, and whose characters in The Daffodil Affair muse on the possibilities of their being in a novel by Michael Innes). Here, we have discussions of the murder as a detective story and of the reliableness of evidence (“What is proof?”). It is not, however, merely as an intellectual exercise that Lodging impresses, but as an orthodox detective story, albeit a very complex and ingenious one. Innes demonstrates great competence in the matter of maps, keys and the creation of Dodd’s “submarine,” insight in the attempts of his characters to understand their psychology and everyone else’s, and fertility in the invention and handling of such bizarre clues as bath-chairs, blood and bones. The most impressive bit comes at the end, where Innes plays really ingenious games with evidence to show how truth varies for everyone, depending on how much — or how little — they know.

Murder at a pseudo-Oxbridge college; very complicated plot with the eccentric dons involved in different aspects of the case and covering up. Minute-by-minute alibi timetables are the thing here. Nice debut. Introduces Appleby's don-cum-mystery writer friend Giles Gott. (My original title page comment: "Academic dodos in their forest.")

Wyatt James