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The Journeying Boy

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 3 months ago

Innes, Michael - The Journeying Boy / The Case of the Journeying Boy (1949)

 

 

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

A first-class thriller strongly reminiscent of Hitchcock. Like Innes’s best work, it is “milder sensational fiction, nicely top-dressed with a compost of literature and the arts, which is produced by idle persons living in colleges and rectories”. Happily, Innes avoids his usual habit of having “the situation…degenerate from melodrama into rough-and-tumble farce.”

 

The plot is told from two (later three) perspectives, and deals with the assassination of a public school teacher and a dazzling scheme of impersonation in order to kidnap a physicist’s son, who is the hero. The boy and replacement tutor are seen from one angle (action / adventure), while the mystery of the tutor’s death is investigated by Inspector Cadover (from What Happened at Hazelwood). This technique of the shift in emphasis adds to, rather than detracts from, the story, and keeps the reader from becoming bored (not that there’s much chance of that in this tale of midnight excursions, dream sequences on trains invoking The Lady Vanishes, and showdowns at burning Irish manor-houses).

 

The mystery plot is subservient to the thriller, but there is a good scattering of suspicion and doubt throughout. As one of the characters remarks, “the basis of success in this trade is to keep on suspecting everybody all the time. But, of course, there has to be a limit to it.”

 

And Innes does manage to keep the plot under control, and to make the thriller thrill. Full marks also for the Irish dialogue, which is nearly as good as the Scots in Lament for a Maker.


Inspector Cadover returns. A thriller involving attempts at kidnapping by two rival gangs. Beautifully done, if overlong and very wordy in parts; also a lot of the Ireland portion of the story is caricature. There are two interweaving threads to the story: the adventures of the boy and his tutor, and the investigation of the murder of the previous tutor. The adventures are prime Innes (especially the train scenes where most of the passengers are the cast of a circus). The investigation is far more interesting; Cadover is much more of a procedural cop than Appleby ever was, and he does a great job. More passing references to Appleby, whom the author seems determined to have retired -- but he is back in the next book.

 

Wyatt James

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