Innes, Michael - Sheiks and Adders (1982)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

It can’t be said that this is great Innes. Although amusing enough, it is very badly plotted. The fête setting is jejune and embarrassing, and the plot sags. Plot? There is no plot. “There was something rambling and untidy about the entire situation, a lack of anything that could be called a clear-cut mystery at the centre of it, which was decidedly not to his taste.” Nothing is done with the sheiks, apart from the problem of why it should “occur to so many men to dress up for Mr. Chitfield’s fête virtually in an identical way”. When murder does occur, by archery (“there is a certain hazard to life in archery when conducted in too light-hearted and casual a fashion, since a longbow is quite as lethal a weapon as a revolver”) it is explained in one paragraph, the book then turning into an attempt to smuggle the Emir out of a house surrounded by an unfriendly crowd. Attempts to involve “a high-level hinterland to the whole affair” by centring the book’s “plot” around a financial crisis involving Middle Eastern oil (“fishing in troubled waters—but with no shortage of oil to pour on them”) do not help. Shallow and thoroughly bad.

High adventures at a country-house fête near Dream. Villains (burglarous druids, Arab terrorists, a gang of boy scouts, several sheiks only one of whom is real, and escape by hot-air balloon). Middling Innes of his whimsical sort.

Wyatt James