Innes, Michael - A Private View / One-Man Show / Murder is an Art (1952)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

Minor Innes, but thoroughly entertaining. It is a mixture of farce, thriller and detective story, set against an art background, enabling Innes to use a stolen Vermeer as the novel’s Macguffin, and to incorporate such characters as the shady art dealer Hildebert Braunkopf, the highly effeminate critic Mervyn Twist, the revolting criminal Steptoe, and the moral fanatic Lady Clancarron, as well as some of the characters from Hamlet, Revenge! (Scamnum Court is now open to the public), and the grief-struck amnesiac lover of the victim. Humour is excellent, both black (Limbert’s blood dripping through the ceiling onto Zhitkov’s statue) and bawdy (“He was busy with his privates!”); also a farcical fight in a Chelsea junk shop. The book is complex and well-plotted, with a mystery cleared up in every chapter, and another introduced to take its place.

Art snobbery par excellence, one of Innes's specialties ("A determined effort to disintegrate reality in the interest of the syncretic principle"); also rival gangs of sleazy crooks. Art theft and forgery. Nicely satirical -- cf. Freeman's Stoneware Monkey. Our old friend, the Duke of Horton (from Hamlet, Revenge) is back. Judith Appleby does some sleuthing on her own. This is a very funny story, including the bizarre accent of the art dealer Hildebert Braunkopf, who henceforth appears in other Inneses as too good to be a one-off character. [PS: Appleby is now Assistant Commissioner, however he got there without going up through the ranks. Maybe his erudition was just too awesome for his superiors, but I doubt it. Must have been influence from Duke of Horton or somebody who went to school with the Home Secretary.]

Wyatt James