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| The New Sonia Wayward |
| Michael Innes |
| First published by Victor Gollancz 1960, Published in Penguin 1964 |
Review by Marian Hussenbux  |
| Michael Innes, the alter ego of J.I.M.Stewart, is a habit some readers never acquire, but those who do find the books addictive. One of the most idiosyncratic of writers, in his field of quirky British crime Michael Innes is on his own. Arguably, his early works are the most successful. As time passed, themes and concepts recur and dénouements, to the seasoned Innes reader, become less surprising. Dark family histories, impersonation, identical twins, forgeries - this is the stuff of which an Innes book is constructed. His detective, John, later Sir John, Appleby and his aristocratic and artistic wife, Judith Raven, figure in many of the 50 stories and they represent the civilized, well-read, slightly eccentric British high bourgeoisie of the forties and fifties. This is a fantasy world. When I first read the novels in the sixties, in my twenties, Innes's characters were quite exotic to me. The Barbican Library in London asked a number of today's most popular crime writers to name their favourite authors. Shots magazine (Spring 2000) lists them.Only one of the fifteen surveyed mentions Michael Innes. This is H.R.F.Keating, who cites The New Sonia Wayward. Colonel Ffolliot Petticate - yes, really - is all at sea in Chapter One. Not only is he actually on the high seas, but his wife, Sonia, the celebrated writer of romances, upon whom he is financially dependent, has just unaccountably dropped dead. How Petticate copes with this blow and contrives to turn it to his advantage it would be wrong to divulge. Not only does Innes construct satisfying plots, where the wrongdoer, somehow or other, gets his or her comeuppance, but he peoples the work with a wealth of bizarre, devious and often criminal minor characters. Augusta Gotlop, née Gale-Warning, "authoress of talent", who "affects bangles of obtrusively barbaric suggestion", is large, loud and calls Petticate "Blimp"; her ancient bloodhound, Johnson, undergoes massage at the Canine Clinic, and Boswell, the disturbed Pekinese, has occupational therapy to treat his neuroses, which involves burying and unburying bones. Ambrose Wedge, Sonia's publisher, "a man of curiously pyramidal structure", can predict how the plots and characters of his author's formulaic novels will develop. "Does it (the new book) begin in an artist's studio, or aboard the Queen Mary, or just before Lord Somebody's guests start to arrive for a house-party?" The obsequious and apparently stupid Hennwifes, man and wife, who are responsible for the colonel's domestic comfort, turn out to be "vile conspirators", whom Petticate feels obliged to try to kill in an elaborately orchestrated way, rather than submit to their blackmail. Last but not least, Susie Smith - woman of the demi-monde, "much more vulgar than he had supposed" who terrifies him at their chance first meeting by accusing him of drowning her aunt in the bath, takes to the good life like a fish to water. The novel is ridden with class-consciousness and a tongue-in-cheek assumption of the virtues of the higher bourgeoisie, but it is a fantastic depiction of its era and there is much quaint charm in Innes's witty and richly characterized world. It used to be said that "Mr. Innes engages the fourteen-year-old in high-brows". If you enjoy a literary and literate crime book and have a taste for almost slapstick comedy, try Michael Innes. |
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