Innes, Michael - The Mysterious Commission

Honeybath is Innes's 'second detective' (in four books, anyway). He is a prominent Royal Academy portrait painter and also a great fan of Sherlock Holmes (unlike Appleby). Here he gets into a typical Innes thriller situation when he is commissioned, and thus got out of the way, to paint a senile gang leader while a rival gang uses his studio cellar as a site to tunnel into a nearby bank vault. Not bad, but not really a mystery story. Innes likes to have cultivated middle-aged heroes get into hot water and display unexpected spunkiness.

Wyatt James