Customer Reviews
Intelligent Escapism - By: SARAH MCCARTNEY, 28 Jun 2008 
Vintage crime novels are my guilty secret. Michael Innes is one of my favourites & Death at the President's Lodging is an excellent murder mystery full of complex clues, a tinful of red herrings & nail-biting suspense.
Laterin life, Inspector Appleby gets promoted & starts to express his political views. I find him a little tiresome once he has retired from Scotland Yard when as Sir John Appleby he starts to pontificate about taxes & the poor unfortunate upper classes having to open their stately homes to the public. Mind you, despite his lecturing, Michael Innes still writes wonderfully intriguing criminal mystery stories for Appleby to solve.
In Death at the President's Lodging, Appleby is young, witty, a bit of an upstart at the Yard, able to scramble over high walls, break rules & get away with it. I'd recommend this one, & all the early novels, to everyonein need of a means to escape from the daily grind.
Introducing a New Talent - By: hacklehorn, 27 Apr 2001 Plan of St. Anthony's College Innes' first book, introducing Inspector Appleby, & one of his best. The setting is St. Anthony's College, somewhere between Oxford & Cambridge; the victim, Dr. Umpleby, shot to deathin his study surrounded by a grisly litter of bones belonging to a lunatic don. Inspector Appleby comes down from London to the college he attended, interrogates a bevy of eccentric & aged dons, is conked on the head, & strikes up a friendship with the Giles Gott of the later Hamlet, Revenge! The plot is one of Innes' best, with one of the most dazzling of all firework displays at the end. The events are extraordinary: dons rushing aroundin false whiskers, dead bodies carted around the universityin wheelchairs, lunatic asylums, & labyrinths of false evidence. Genuine clueing & thinking, complicated time-tables, a great amount of mystification, & first-class misdirection.
