A Night of Errors

Michael Innes

ISBN 10: 1842327488 / ISBN 13: 9781842327487

Editore: House of Stratus, 2001

Riguardo questo articolo

A Night of Errors (2001) by Michael Innes , published by House of Stratus (ISBN: 9781842327487 ), is the sort of crime novel that doesn?t just offer you a mystery ? it offers you a mystery with a raised eyebrow, a literary aside, and the faint sense that everyone involved is either too clever for their own good or about to be undone by someone who is. Michael Innes (the pen name of J. I. M. Stewart) is classic ?detective fiction for people who like their murders with footnotes.? His books have that wonderfully civilised British tone where things are appalling but manners must be maintained, and where the investigation proceeds not only through clues but through conversation, wit, and the steady unpicking of human absurdity. If you enjoy your crime fiction with a splash of academia and a dash of theatre, you?re in very safe hands ? except, of course, for the part where someone is dead. The title A Night of Errors has the cosy ring of a mistaken booking at a seaside hotel. It sounds like the sort of thing you?d laugh about later. But in Innes-land, errors have consequences, and the consequences tend to involve secrets, misdirection, and the sort of plot architecture that feels like an elegant clockwork toy until you realise it?s also sharp. What you get is that deliciously ironic blend: a story that is, at heart, a puzzle ? yet also a commentary on the people trying to solve it. Innes has a knack for making his characters feel like they?re playing roles in their own lives, often without noticing. There?s a hint of farce, a hint of menace, and a constant sense that the real mystery isn?t just ?who did it,? but ?why do humans keep doing things like this.? House of Stratus editions have that pleasing ?rediscovered classic? vibe: the sort of reprint that quietly rescues a book from the fog of out-of-print obscurity and hands it back to readers who like their Golden Age-ish mysteries a little sharper and more literate than the average country-house corpse. This copy is in Good condition as sold by Crappy Old Books , which is perfect for a Michael Innes novel: the kind of book you want to pick up on a rainy evening, read with a cup of tea, and then find yourself staying up later than planned because you?ve become personally invested in proving you?re smarter than the plot. (You may or may not win. Innes enjoys that.) Ideal for: fans of classic British detective fiction with brains and bite readers who like witty dialogue and elegant construction anyone who enjoys mysteries that feel slightly theatrical and slightly scholarly people who think a well-placed irony is almost as satisfying as a solved crime A murder mystery that behaves like a drawing-room comedy until it remembers it?s also a murder mystery. One night. Many errors. And you, happily complicit, turning the pages.

Codice articolo 5661

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: A Night of Errors
• Editore: House of Stratus
• Data di pubblicazione: 2001
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1842327488
• ISBN 13: 9781842327487
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

A gruelling night of shrouded motives and confused identities develops when the last of the Dromios is found murdered, with both of his hands burnt off. He was one of triplets, whose brothers had died in a fire forty years previously. Inspector Appleby wrenches the facts from a melodrama in which the final solution is written in fire.

Informazioni sull?autore

Born in Edinburgh in 1906, the son of the city's Director of Education, John Innes Mackintosh Stewart wrote a highly successful series of mystery stories under the pseudonym Michael Innes.

Innes was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and named a Bishop Frazer's scholar. After graduation, he went to Vienna to study Freudian psychoanalysis for a year and following his first book, an edition of Florio's translation of 'Montaigne', was offered a lectureship at the University of Leeds. In 1932 he married Margaret Hardwick, a doctor, and they subsequently had five children including Angus, also a novelist.

The year 1936 saw Innes as Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, during which tenure he wrote his first mystery story, 'Death at the President's Lodging'. With his second, 'Hamlet Revenge', Innes firmly established his reputation as a highly entertaining and cultivated writer. After the end of World War II, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen's University, Belfast, where in 1949 he wrote the 'Journeying Boy', a novel notable for the richly comedic use of an Irish setting. He then settled down as a Reader in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he retired in 1973.

Innes's most famous character is 'John Appleby', who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this day. His other well-known character is 'Honeybath', the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in 1975 in 'The Mysterious Commission'.

The last of the Innes novels, 'Appleby and the Ospreys', was published in 1986, some eight years before his death in 1994. His work is still very highly regarded and 'Appleby's End' and 'The New Sonia Wayward' were chosen by H.R.F. Keating as being amongst the best 100 crime novels ever written. The 'Times Literary Supplement' said of him: 'A Master - he constructs a plot that twists and turns like an electric eel: it gives you shock upon shock and you cannot let go.'