A Private View by Michael Innes

A Private View by Michael Innes

Sir John and Lady Appleby attend a memorial exhibition of the oils, gouaches, collages and trouvailles of artist Gavin Limbert, who was recently found shot, under very suspicious circumstancesAs Assistant Commissioner of Police, Sir John is already interested, but he becomes even more intrigued when Limbert's last masterpiece is stolen from the gallery under his very eyes

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 InnesInnes was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and named a Bishop Frazer's scholarAfter 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 novelistThe 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 LodgingWith his second, Hamlet Revenge, Innes firmly established his reputation as a highly entertaining and cultivated writerAfter the end of World War I, Innes 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 settingHe then settled down as a Reader in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he retired in 1973

His most famous character is 'John Appleby', who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this dayInnes's other well-known character is 'Honeybath', the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in 1975 in The Mysterious CommissionThe last novel, Appleby and the Ospreys, was published in 1986, some eight years before his death in 1994