Innes, Michael - The Secret Vanguard (1940)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

Innes’s first thriller: a homage to Buchan’s Thirty-nine Steps, and just as dull. Although it opens well, with the murder of a particularly harmless and wholesome poet, Appleby and detection are soon replaced with the story of Sheila Grant, a heroine on the run in Scotland. Appleby does very little until very late in the book, when an outrageous transvestite battle takes place. Poetry is used by spies to convey secret information before witnesses — an idea Innes seems to think is novel, but has been used before, and is not up to the standards of either Sayers or Bailey — or, indeed, of Buchan.

A spy novel, some nonsense about a secret formula. The book is a pastiche of Buchan's classic suspense-pursuit novel The 39 Steps, and is well done in that sub-sub-genre -- including all the improbable coincidental encounters in the remote Scottish Highlands. Not to be taken at all seriously.

Wyatt James