Mount TBR #13

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

Death at the Chase – Michael Innes

The mysteries starring Sir John Appleby started in 1936 and ended in 1986.  Those from the 1970s and 1980s are the length of novelettes and are entertainments in learned style and puckish humor. I think the main audience are avid readers who read genre fiction between nonfiction and serious fiction. Writers similar to Michael Innes would be Margery Allingham, Patricia Wentworth, Nicholas Blake, Cyril Hare, and Michael Gilbert.

In this 1970 novel, Sir John is in retirement at his wife’s estate Long Dream Manor in Gloucestershire. Of course, this is a country-house murder case. Of course, the recurring character Chief Constable Tommy Pride has Sir John informally take over the investigation of the murder that doesn’t happen until about just after the half-way point of the book. Of course, the murder of a rich miser has brought to the fore mean and quarrelsome relatives.

There is not much in the way of mystery. But Innes touches lightly on the theme of the past having sway over the present. During the war the murder victim, under torture, revealed names of Resistance fighters to the occupiers, resulting in round-ups and massacres. So on the anniversary of that day, an attempt is made on Ashmore's life.

'What we're considering is that there may be a kind of joke at the heart of it,' Appleby said. 'A thoroughly evil joke. But you're absolutely right about the criminal mind – or rather about any mind wrought to plan and perpetrate something like murder. Calculation and rationality can suddenly go by the board, and something quite unpremeditated, and even quite profitless and meaningless, take their place. That's why detective stories are of no interest to policemen. Their villains remain far too consistently cerebral.'

This is probably true.  This is why former detective Dashiell Hammett has Gutman say in The Maltese Falcon, “That's an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides.  Because as you know, sir, in the heat of action, men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.”