Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book, free of charge,from Ipso Books via netgalley, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it, all opinions are my own.
Welcome to Mystery Monday!
Yup- all day- nothing but mysteries for you to add to your reading lists!
To start us off, the oldest book:
Lament for a Maker was originally published in 1938.
Synopsis
Something is amiss at a remote castle isolated in the Scottish Highlands. Raving recluse Ranald Guthrie, much despised laird of Erchany, has been wandering his halls obsessively reciting an old Scottish poem: Timor mortis conturbat me. Fear of death disturbs me…
In the depths of a howling winter night, Guthrie falls to his death from the tower of his castle.
Inspector Appleby is called in to investigate this deadly accident. Immersing himself in the lonesome world in which Guthrie spent his final days, Appleby must separate dreadful truth from chilling legend to determine what really happened on that terrible night.
Was this truly an accident? Was Guthrie driven mad enough to take his own life? Or does something darker lurk within this gothic castle?
Review
This was the first book of Innes' I had actually read. It is the third book in the Appleby series.
I have to admit it was a bit slow going in the beginning- 4 narrators, 1 in heavy Scottish dialect, can make the readers head spin just a tad! Add in more narrators along the way and the book might be best read in spurts, so as not to confuse you too much, and to allow your brain to think on what has occurred and try to put all the pieces together easier.There are a few twists and turns to stymy the reader, and the final account might be a bit of a surprise. i'd call this the hardest of the mysteries today to read, but a good example of how the mystery series evolved!
About the Author
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.'
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