Innes, Michael - Stop Press / The Spider Strikes (1939)

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

“It all began in folly and in mere fantasy it is likely to end… It has been literally a preposterous affair. Endless complications and a promise of murder right at the end…”

A staggering tour de force, “a huge and improbable fantasy from top to bottom,” “very complicated and very closely knit. It is a long time since I enjoyed anything so much.” That said, the book is perhaps not to everybody’s taste, for, in this day and age of mindless sensationalism, who has the time to read a book three times longer than the normal detective story, and one which, to boot, requires an appreciation for literary allusions, wit and style? Those who do miss out, however, will be missing something very special indeed, for this is one of the half-dozen best detective stories ever. The plot concerns, among other things, the escape of the Spider (rather like Leslie Charteris’s Saint, a reformed criminal who has become a legendary detective) from the pages of Richard Eliot’s books into those of Michael Innes; medical hypnosis; telepathy; paramnesia; metaphysics; and a slew of minor outrages in the manner of Sayers’s Gaudy Night. While Innes does a superb job of handling the complications and making the numerous sub-plots coherent, the book’s greatest strength is its style. Large swathes of the book are taken up with hilarious literary pastiches, amusing minor characters and a great deal of carefully-constructed nonsense. It is what one would expect if Stella Gibbons wrote Hamlet, Revenge!, and decided to do away with the murder.

Much ado about nothing, or a very long shaggy dog story. A series of set pieces with nice buildups and descriptions, ending up with anticlimaxes, over and over again for 400 pages. Appleby does absolutely nothing except make obscure comments ("I know the method but not the motive"). There is a particularly revolting romance between Appleby's sister and a callow undergraduate of Oxford, a naive male-chauvenist pretentious ass if there ever was one, and that doesn't improve matters. This is Innes's Gaudy Night. Pooh.

Wyatt James