Innes, Michael - Hamlet, Revenge! (1937)

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

Michael Innes is unique in writing four masterpieces in rapid succession at the beginning of his career. This is the second, set at one of England’s Stately Homes, and featuring the memorable onstage murder of no less a person than the Lord Chancellor while acting in Hamlet. Naturally, international implications are rife, and the P.M. is worried, so a very young Appleby is sent down. Everything in the book is a sheer joy — a delight, making this genuinely intelligent novel a book to be read slowly — to be savoured. As is common with Innes, it is much more than mere mathematical ingenuity. Innes was a novelist. The characters are superb, and, despite a huge cast (twenty-eight principals), memorable and distinct. The detection is first-class: in-depth, but entertaining, and never dull. The detection culminates in a brilliantly Innesian solution at the end of Part Three. That and the ensuing events are a dazzling firework display — the firework display of the electric eel.

Excellent murder story, of the Lord Chancellor no less, set in a huge Blenheim-Palace-like country house during a grand production of Hamlet in the great hall. Giles Gott appears again, as director of the play, and the cast has many upper-upper-crust characters. A spy element, but basically a good mystery. The Hamlet stuff is very good, as is Lady Elizabeth's method of hiding from the killer. The killer is also a fascinating study, and the misdirection by the author that also contains the solution. Gott, of course, comes up with a logically ingenious explanation that turns out to be completely wrong.

Wyatt James

See also: http://www.facebook.com/l/1AQGyKpEq/at-scene-of-crime.blogspot.ca/2012/09/a-deed-of-dreadful-note.html