Innes, Michael - Appleby Plays Chicken / Death on a Quiet Day

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

Rather weak Innes. Opens admirably with a reading-party, descriptions of lonely walks on Dartmoor, and the discovery of an unknown corpse, but soon degenerates into a standard chase — standard thriller stuff, not very imaginative. The reader shares the hero’s belief that “they were all wildly excited. But he didn’t feel that way at all. He supposed he’d had enough.” Things pick up somewhat with Appleby at the helm, investigating the murder of his former chief, but the solution is silly, unconvincing, convoluted, improbable and poorly explained.

A chase story: a witness to a murder, having to be eliminated, is pursued on Dartmoor. Involves a gaggle of idiotically impulsive undergraduates on a reading tour (the author was a professor so has more tolerance for callow youth than I do). Interesting that most of them had already done their National Service (England still had a draft then) before becoming students, but oddly still have no expertise about sex or dealing with women (what on earth is this thingie for and how does one use it?) -- this is pre-sixties, however.

Wyatt James