Innes, Michael - The Weight of the Evidence (1944)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

From beginning to end, this Appleby tale set in a university is a sheer delight to read, due to the excellent dialogue, the humour, the interesting and amusing characters, and the maze of bizarre and mystifying events, involving meteorites, love affairs and false beards. In some respects, it is very similar to Carr’s Arabian Nights Murder. Although Innes proves himself adept at false theories and misleading clues, the ending is an anti-climax.

Professor at a provincial English university is murdered by having a meteorite dropped on him from a tower. There are some good bizarre Dickensian scenes such as Innes specialized in: e.g., Mrs Dearlove's incredibly noisy boarding house, Lord Nesfield's gigantic mansion, and Professor Prisk's philological musings on words such as acritochromancy, acroasis, acronyctous, and acrocomic (long-haired), and as usual every suspect was up to something if not murder. Some good political comment about the dog-kennel idealism of Socialists (a prediction of suburbia and fast food and Thatcherism even) and the coming fate of nobles and eccentrics. But the crime and its solution is rather ridiculous.

Wyatt James