Deftly Drawn…
The sixth in the Inspector Appleby series of mysteries and a trigger happy country house set is about to give the normally empathetic inspector great cause for consternation. With the usual brand of deftly drawn characters and a complex plot riddled with red herrings, this is an enjoyable and entertaining addition to this superlative series and a fine example of a solid Golden Age detective story.

A classic 'on the edge of your seat thriller'. If you like Le Carre or classic early Hitchcock thrillers you'll love this.

An Appleby mystery that indulges in the sort of cross-talk and snobbery of the English country house mystery with not a lot of more to hand the reader's hat on. It picks up at the end but you're wading through some real nonsense to get there. I'd not recommend this one but I think the completists for the series won't be too disappointed.

Having enjoyed two of Michael Innes’ Inspector Appleby novels last year – Hamlet, Revenge! and Lament for a Maker – I was drawn to this one next, because I liked the title and thought it would be appropriate as we'd had some snowy weather here recently. Actually, although the novel is set during the Christmas period and there are a few mentions of snow, it doesn’t have a particularly wintry feel and could be read at any time of year.

It begins with our narrator, Arthur Ferryman, arriving at a family gathering at Belrive Priory, the home of his cousin, Basil Roper. The priory has been in the family for generations and nobody feels a closer affinity with its ancient stone walls, formal gardens and soot-blackened ruins than Arthur does. It comes as a shock, then, when he hears that Basil is planning to sell the estate to finance an expedition. As more members of the Roper family descend, along with various cousins and friends, it becomes clear that Arthur is not the only one unhappy with Basil’s decision. When one of the party is found shot while sitting at the desk in the study, there are plenty of suspects and plenty of motives. With perfect timing, Inspector Appleby arrives at the door just as the body is discovered, having received an invitation from Basil. Can Appleby find the culprit before someone else is hurt?

There Came Both Mist and Snow is my least favourite of the three Innes novels I’ve read so far. The mystery itself was well-constructed; Appleby seems to play a bigger role than in the other two books (certainly than in Lament for a Maker, where he only appeared near the end) and I enjoyed following the course of his investigations, with Arthur Ferryman as a sort of Watson character. There are several possible theories which are put forward by various members of the party and all of them seem plausible, which means the reader is constantly being led in the wrong direction. I would never have guessed the eventual solution; the clues aren’t concealed from the reader, exactly, but it’s definitely not something that is easy to deduce for yourself.

My problem with the book was due mainly to the length of time it took to get started. In the opening chapters we are given a lot of information on the Roper family background, the history of Belrive Priory and the changes that have come to the surrounding area as the neon lights of breweries and factories begin to shine into the priory’s ancient grounds. This information wasn’t completely insignificant, but I felt that it could have been woven more gradually into the story so that we could have reached the crime itself more quickly.

I think I would also have found the book more enjoyable if the characters had not been such an unpleasant and uninteresting group of people! I did like one of them – Arthur’s cousin Lucy Chigwidden, who happens to be a crime novelist, which gives Innes a chance to poke fun at his own profession – but none of the others were what I would consider strong or memorable characters. I was a bit disappointed by this one, especially after enjoying the others so much, but I will continue to read the Appleby mysteries.

The book is interesting even if it is a bit slow. The characters are interesting but it takes quite a long time before the action starts.
I'm a fan of Golden Age mystery but it took quite an effort to keep on reading and sometimes had to go back in order to see if I understood everything.
Quite a good book but it did not age well and it is more an interesting picture of an era than an engaging mystery.
Many thanks to Ipso Books and Netgalley

Like many, I enjoy detective novels written by 20th century authors; from the description and the excellent cover I expected an exciting read.

Originally published in 1940, and part of a series of books about Inspector Appleby, this is the story of a relatively well-to-do family coming together at Christmas. They seem a little eccentric and rather idiosyncratic and there are many opportunities for them to grumble and gripe at each other. Things come to a head when someone is shot, just before dinner.

Some stories stand the test of time better than others. We were introduced to all the characters fairly speedily, but the action took a while to get started. Unusually, I didn’t find any of the characters were people that I would have liked, with the possible exception of the brash mill owner in his ‘50 shilling suit’. The conversation style seemed a little ‘mannered’ and brittle for me. The descriptive sections were best, particular details of the ruins, with the nearby neon signs.

An interesting book with some less than stellar aspects. While the character of Sir John Appleby is always interesting to read about. However, this story does tend to drag on a bit and hearing every possibility and all the witty dialogue was a bit of a bore.

In recent months I have been reading quite a lot of classic 20th century crime fiction. Some good, some less so, some that stands up well to a 21st century reading and some that feels a little more dated. This title I was drawn to by the excellent cover and that it is a ‘seasonal’ tale. The fact that NetGalley gave me a copy for free was also encouraging! This is the first Michael Innes title that I have read and it appears to be one of a quite large series of novels based around one character, Sir John Appleby and to be honest, I’m not sure but it may be my last.
Although the book is short, the plot really took quite a while to get going and in the lead up to the action the book consists almost entirely of overly smart, flippant dialogue which becomes quite tiresome very quickly. I became more than a little bored.
Throughout the book the writing, although sharp and erudite, is a little too tongue-in-cheek for my liking and I found that it did not take too long for the flippancy to become irritating. Maybe I should have been expecting this as the alternative title for this novel is A Comedy of Terrors…
That’s not to say that there is not some things to like in the novel; once Appleby arrives and the plot eventually gets going it is fairly entertaining and creates a good puzzle but the characters are mere sketches and the dark aspect of the incident is treated very lightly and almost with humour; although it could be said that these complaints could be levelled at of many of the author’s contemporaries. The mistake may be that after reading a superb Georges Simenon book I directly followed with this one, which possibly highlighted the limitations in the story and the less distinct voice of the author.
Overall I would have to say that I enjoyed There Came Both Mist And Snow but probably mainly because of the seasonal setting of the story and the fact that I read it over the Christmas period. My hope is that this was written as a ‘novelty’ Christmas story for fans of Sir John Appleby and that the other Michael Innes that I have waiting to be read will have a little more weight to them.

I read about this book in an overview of some period mysteries with unusual elements, so when I saw it at NetGalley I requested it at once.

I enjoyed it overall, though it’s a mixed bag of elements I don’t see often enough (a rare whodunnit) and elements I loathe (at one point Appleby is horrifyingly unprofessional, and everyone is veddy blasé about it).

Most of the country manor characters are present and much of the type, so you may love or hate them - I enjoyed the narrator and his intermittent awareness of his own foibles. I particularly liked one of the minor characters, a village boy made good as a successful brewer.

In spite of the unusual ending, the book didn’t completely succeed for me as a mystery, and I don’t think it’s a good “deduce for yourself” book. But Innes has an engaging voice, and I’ll gladly read more of Inspector Appleby.

Again Michael Innes does not disappoint, his books are of the era and very unusual storylines. They do take a while to get into them, but once immersed they really are hard to put down, this one is no different; and whiles some of the twist and turns were predictable, it provides entertainment to the end.

Last month I had my first taste of Michael Innes’ work when I read Lament for a Maker, a novel that I found a thoroughly frustrating read because of Innes’ decision to write a third of it in Scots dialect. In spite of that though I thought the murder mystery plot was quite clever and so I resolved to give Innes another chance.

There Came Both Mist and Snow is a story set at Christmas in which a family gathers to celebrate the season together. We soon learn that members of the family harbor resentments towards each other and that nearly every member of the party have become fanatics about shooting revolvers on a range that has been constructed on the grounds.

I suspect you can guess what happens next.

A member of the party is found shot at a desk. Fortunately Inspector Appleby happens to arrive on the scene as a guest and is available to lend a hand in looking into the incident. Quickly he decides to recruit the narrator as a sort of reluctant Watson figure to his Holmes and they begin their investigation, soon realizing that the details of the crime may not be as straightforward as they first appeared.

While There Came Both Mist and Snow may not have been written in dialect, I found it to be similarly frustrating to read. The first ten chapters are particularly rough going and show signs of an author determined to let the reader know that they are Very Smart. Having now read a fair number of Golden Age novels, I am always prepared to hit the dictionary to lookup a word that may have fallen into disuse or check on one of those obscure classical allusions that every child would have picked up on in the 1920 and 30s but there are some words used here that would have been archaic or pretentious even then. Examples include valetudinarian, cicerone, hypnogogic and badinage.

Other examples of random, frustrating literariness include an extended scene in which characters take turns giving Shakespearian quotations relating to bells in a sort of impromptu contest which even the characters find tiresome. While I know there are readers who love this sort of dense, literary material, it really detracted from the experience for me.

What makes these sorts of things so frustrating is that Innes, when he forgets about being literary, is often quite an entertaining writer and comes up with some lovely, witty remarks or memorable turns of phrase. For instance, using ‘he had the mental habits of an industrious but unimaginative squirrel’ to describe a character. And once the shooting takes place the book does gain a much-needed sense of focus and direction.

The crime itself did at least hold some interest for me, in part because the victim is not killed by the gunshot which is something of a novelty in crime fiction and also because the circumstances of the shooting are not clear. Appleby’s job investigating this crime is complicated because it is not clear that the person shot was the intended victim and this does lead to some interesting theorizing and discussion about the different possible explanations there could be for what had happened.

This could have been the recipe for a memorable crime story but the elements just didn’t click for me. I think that may reflect that I simply didn’t find the cast of characters interesting or memorable. It often felt to me that the author was more interested in providing witty commentaries on their artistic inclinations and pretensions than in establishing them as credible killers. Appleby’s investigation seems to meander and the ending, with features several different theories being offered, dragged and disappointed.

Having now given Sir John Appleby and his creator two chances to impress me, I feel I can say with some confidence that these stories are simply not for me and I am unlikely to try any others. If you enjoy denser, more literary reads this may be of interest and worth investigation.

There was always a puckish side to Innes, not least about endings, and big houses, and families, but also, habitually, floating threads of English literature (which was J.I.M. Stewart’s day job), or, indeed, the history of the English language. Appleby is, after all, Oxford-educated and therefore a gentleman detective. He was a bachelor then. So there is a big house, with questions about its future, especially as two local brewers’ neon signs dominate the land around the house. Appleby has been invited to dine with the family, and the brewers, because he has interests which overlap with some of the relatives. And then there’s a shot. Was it intended for the current holder of the Belrive Priory domain, Basil Roper (7th baronet), or for someone else in the family? After all, in most country house murder mysteries, there are always striving siblings and cousins after the spoils, a kind of wannabe entitlement.
In the case against ‘cosy’ mysteries, their snobbery is one of the counts held against them. Cousin Arthur Ferryman, who narrates the story, doesn’t have anything to do with ferries; it’s an old historical deformation of ‘the iron hand’, and thus, inevitably, the ruling classes. The moniker of the plebeian brewer, Cudbird, is a form of Cuthbert, a native saint revered in the northeast, including much of Yorkshire. In our day, the mix of snobbery, deference, and the snub has retreated. One has to be pretty clear that there are elements of ‘the condition of England’ novel (though perhaps the Scot in Stewart might have voiced it otherwise). Both brewers want to buy the house and its land; Sir Basil’s heir is his brother, whose own heir, his son, has other things in mind. Their sister writes bad crime fiction—which sells. As Appleby take over the investigation, his methods can be unorthodox. I say no more.
With the onset of winter, this kind of book comes into its own, not just with the complexities of the plot, or the poetry, or its variety of red herrings. Getting to the end, more or less ‘in the library’, is much less interesting than the cast of characters, and—as so often in this series—there is quite something to be annoyed by at the end. Never mind. Set the logs in the fire and put on the kettle. There’s your evening in.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ipso Books for the digital review copy.

First published 1940,under this title in Britain, and in the US as “A Comedy of Terrors”, this is the sixth John Appleby Mystery.

It is unusual in that it has a first person narrator, author Arthur Ferryman, who gives an account of the events surrounding the shooting of his cousin, Wilfred Foxcroft at the family house, Belrive Priory, one Christmas.

Belrive is full of relatives of the current owner, Sir Basil Roper, who is intent on selling the house and estate.We have his nephews Wilfred and Cecil, his brother Hubert and nephew Geoffrey, his sister,Lucy, and second cousin, Anne, as well as a doctor, two local industrialists and assorted servants…and Appleby.

I found the book wholly tiresome. The “witty” dialogue, the literary games and allusions, the studied cleverness all became rather wearing . Everyone has a theory to propound and we hear them all. Although, as might be expected, the book’s title (from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), is significant, the solution is not remotely guessable by any reader, apart from the most expert. It is ingenious , but ultimately, rather a let down.