This book wasn’t a good fit for me. The writing style didn’t pull me in with the first few pages. It may be a good fit for those who can wade through it.

This is 4th Inspector Appleby book I’ve read. Each one seems very different. I think Michael Innes’ writing is an acquired taste with long, meandering sentences. At times I was bored and bewildered and nearly stopped reading, but I persevered until events became clearer, which they did by the end of the book.

Scotland Yard Detective Inspector John Appleby and Everard Raven, once a barrister and now a compiler of encyclopedias, meet on a train. Appleby is travelling to Snarl and Everard to his home at Long Dream Manor where generations of the Raven family have lived. They get off the train at ‘Appleby’s End’ station and from that point on the book travels off on a perilous journey, as supernatural events foretold by one of the Raven ancestors, Ranulph Raven, come true forty years later- or do they?

Throughout the book Innes drops in literary and cultural allusions and comments on writing fiction. At one point Appleby thinks it would be ‘pleasant to retire from the elucidating of crime and give oneself to the creating of unashamed fantasies,’ and that is precisely what Innes has done in this book. Appleby’s End is surreal, a macabre fantasy with a complex and completely unrealistic plot and strange characters, with names like Heyhoe, Rainbird, Hoobin and Scurl,who live in rural, out-of-the-way places with names such as Yatter, Sneak, Snarl, Drool, Boxer’s Bottom, and Linger. There’s been a lot of interbreeding and pig rustling. Strange things are happening, people are turned into marble, or are replaced by waxworks. There’s Mrs Ulstrop who believes she is a cow, plenty of red herrings, ‘spotlights’, needles in haystacks and tales of a ‘howling and hollering head’.

During this rigmarole of events Appleby becomes engaged to Judith Raven, Everard’s cousin and there are hints that he will retire from the police force and become a farmer. This isn’t really a murder mystery and I didn’t like it as much as three of his earlier books that I’ve read- Death at the President’s Lodging, The Secret Vanguard, or The Daffodil Affair. Of those three I much prefer Death at the President’s Lodging, a ‘locked room’ mystery.

I’ve read quite a few of Michael Innes’ Inspector Appleby mysteries now; I think this is my sixth, and although I enjoyed it more than my last one, The Daffodil Affair, it doesn’t compare to my two favourites, Hamlet, Revenge! and Lament for a Maker. While I love the imaginativeness of his plots, some of them are a bit too bizarre and outlandish for me, and this is one of them.

The novel opens with Inspector John Appleby falling into conversation with a man sitting opposite on the train. His name is Everard Raven, an eccentric lawyer and writer of encyclopedias who is on his way home to his family’s country estate, Long Dream Manor. When Appleby discovers that he has made a mistake with the train timetable and won’t be able to reach his own destination until the following day, Everard offers to give him a room for the night at Long Dream. Meanwhile, they have been joined by the other members of the Raven family – Everard’s brothers, Luke and Robert, and two younger cousins, Judith and Mark – who are also returning home. They all disembark from the train together at a station which, to Appleby’s surprise, happens to be called Appleby’s End.

The eventful journey is not over yet, however. The horse-drawn carriage which has been sent to transport them from the station to Long Dream Manor gets stuck crossing a river and Appleby and Judith Raven find themselves separated from the rest of the party. Making their own way back to the house, they make a gruesome discovery – the head of one of the family servants half-buried in a snowdrift. When Appleby begins to investigate, he uncovers a possible connection between the servant’s death and a series of strange happenings in a nearby village. Strangest of all is the fact that these occurrences closely resemble plots from the long-forgotten works of Ranulph Raven, the late father of Everard, Luke and Robert. Can Ranulph’s novels really be starting to come true?

The story quickly becomes more and more surreal, as Appleby encounters a woman who believes she is a cow, animals turning into marble statues and rumours of witchcraft and magic. There are characters with names like Heyhoe and Rainbird and villages called Snarl, Drool, Sneak and Linger. At the heart of the novel there is an interesting and clever mystery taking place, but, for me, it gets lost beneath the sheer ridiculousness of it all. I’m sure it was intended to be a parody of rural life, and I could see some similarities with Cold Comfort Farm at times, but the humour didn’t really work for me.

Based on what I’ve read so far, all of Michael Innes’ novels do seem to be a bit quirky, but I prefer the ones that are slightly more serious. I’ll continue to read his books but I hope the next one I pick up will be a better choice for me.

Innes' Appleby novels are always enjoyable, providing a welcome slice of escapism combined with an intriguing and well-constructed puzzle.

This Appleby was finally a bridge too far; gobbledy-gook nonsense from the first sentence. Like, we GET IT, Mr. Innes, you're waaaay literary and you're tweaking the genre. Oooooh. The least a salty author can do is make his or her polemic readable and this novel fails at that minimum hurdle. A hard pass.

This instalment of the Appleby series is from 1945, and it has all of Innes's typical hallmarks; the dry wit, the literary allusions and the intricate puzzle are all there. However, it also has a sort of bizarre Gothic feel about it, with odd names, very odd characters and so on. I found this quite amusing, and a welcome change from the academic settings its predecessor, The Weight Of The Evidence.

I find I have to space my Innes books out quite widely these days or they become just a bit arch and knowing, but as an occasional fun read they remain very enjoyable and I can recommend Appleby's End to anyone who likes a witty and well written crime novel.

(My thanks to Ipso books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

This was a an intriguing book, a little hard at times to get through, but very much a book one just cannot put away. The mystery winds its way away around a lot of "by tracks and lanes' so to speak, but it does get to a very satisfying end, which seems to be very Michael Innes

This was great fun, with overtones of "Cold Comfort Farm" as well as the usual Classical and Eng. Lit.
references and swipes at Agatha Christie and Victorian literature, painting and sculpture.

Appleby meets the Raven family, among them, Judith, his future wife. They are both swept away and Appleby becomes involved in sorting out a swathe of rural shenanigans which might, or, this being a Michael Innes, might not, encompass murder, witchcraft and lost heirs.

All is sorted out and there is a deliciously unexpected sting in the ultimate paragraph.

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

This series is definitely an acquired taste, and this story is one of the most eccentric: think a typical Golden Age Scotland Yard detective thrust into a Gothic setting, peopled by the weird, the Dickensian and the grotesque. Amidst all the genre-bending, Appleby solves a murder - and gets involved in a romance! Surreal, wacky, erudite and witty.