Seven Suspects Book

I simply Kant take any more...

When Dr Umpleby, the President of prestigious and ancient St Anthony's College, is found murdered, Inspector Appleby of the Yard is rushed to the spot, as the local plods will clearly not be well educated or cultured enough to deal with such a sensitive affair. Fortunately Appleby can quote major and minor philosophers with the best of them and has more than a passing knowledge of all the arcane subjects covered in a classical Oxbridge education, all of which will no doubt help him to uncover who killed the President and why.

The tone of my introduction may have been somewhat of a spoiler for my opinion of the book, so I may as well jump straight to the conclusion – I abandoned this at just under 40%, finally throwing in the towel when one of the characters hinted that the clue to the mystery might be found in an anecdote about Kant quoted in a book by De Quincey. This, only a couple of pages after the following passage...
And he [Inspector Appleby] sipped his whisky and finally murmured to Titlow [a suspect], with something of the whimsicality that Titlow had been adopting a little before, “What truth is it that these mountains bound, and is a lie in the world beyond?”

There was silence while Titlow's eye dwelt meditatively on the policeman conversant with Montaigne. Then he smiled, and his smile had great charm. “I wear my heart on my wall?” he asked. “To project one's own conflicts, to hang them up in simple pictorial terms – it is to be able to step back and contemplate oneself. You understand?”
I couldn't help but feel it might have been more useful had Appleby asked whether Titlow had crept into the college garden in the middle of the night and shot the President, or searched his rooms for the gun, but each to his own, I suppose. And certainly, my method wouldn't have allowed Innes to show his vast erudition and superior intellect, which appears to be the main purpose of the book.

The actual plot is based on there being a limited number of people, almost all academics, who could have had access to Dr Umpleby's rooms at the time of the murder. Sadly, this aspect becomes tedious very quickly with much talk of who had or didn't have keys, where rooms are in relation to each other, where walls and passages are. I felt a desperate need for a nap... oops, I mean a map... after the first several dozen pages of description. Oddly enough, Innes claims Appleby is happier dealing with problems on a “human or psychological plane” and then proceeds to have this great intellectual wandering around in the (literal) dark, playing hunt the missing key. By 40%, only one possible motive had emerged, largely because Appleby seems more interested in listing the academic tomes on the suspects' bookshelves than in trying to find out where they had been at the time of the crime.

This is one of Martin Edwards' picks in his The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, and I've seen several positive reviews of other books of Michael Innes' recently, so I'm willing to accept that my antipathy to this style of writing isn't universal, or perhaps Innes improved in later books – this, I believe, was his first. However, the only emotions it provoked in me were tedium and irritation at the perpetual intellectual snobbery. Having been made to realise my own status as dullard, I shall take my inferior intellect and defective education off into the dunce's corner now... but don't feel too sorry for me, for I shall take with me an ample supply of chocolate and some books by authors who may not have achieved a First in Classics at Oxbridge but who nevertheless know the definition of the word “entertain”...

In truth, I think my rating of this one is harsh – had I been able to convince myself to struggle through it, it may have earned three stars for the quality of the writing and plot. But since I couldn't bring myself to finish it, I fear I can only give it one.

PS Appleby and Umpleby? Seriously??

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Ipso Books.

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