Fri 29 Mar 2019
Archived Review: MICHAEL INNES – Lord Mullion’s Secret.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[9] Comments
MICHAEL INNES – Lord Mullion’s Secret. Charles Honeybath #3. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1982. Penguin, US, paperback, 1983. Published previously in the UK by Victor Gollancz, hardcover, 1981.
There may be a few others, but Innes is one mystery writer who can get away with writing a full-length detective story that doesn’t have a single murder in it. Famed portrait painter Charles Honeybath returns for this latest of now three witty adventures. allowing Innes’s more famous detective character, Sir John Appleby, to continue enjoying his retirement a while longer.
Asked by an old friend to paint his wife, Honeybath quickly discovers that Mullion Castle is filled to the brim with secrets. Small unaccountable things begin to happen as soon as he arrives, including some switched paintings, a clandestine romance between a gardener and the lord’s older daughter, and a dotty great-aunt’s sudden penchant for sleepwalking.
Stately mansions may be becoming more and more difficult to maintain, but they do have their places in mystery fiction, don’t they?
The Charles Honeybath series —
The Mysterious Commission. Gollancz 1974
Honeybath’s Haven. Gollancz 1977
Lord Mullion’s Secret. Gollancz 1981
Appleby and Honeybath. Gollancz 1983
March 29th, 2019 at 6:52 pm
Innes was one of the few writers who could stage a novel like an Ealing comedy and keep you turning pages and smiling for most of it. Not that he wasn’t also a deft hand at the mystery end of things, but at his best he delivered both with a droll and often dry wit not afraid of the rare chuckle or genuine thrills (in his more Buchanesque thrillers) and even drama.
The Honeybath books are good fun as well as fine examples of what by then was a fading style of the British mystery classic.
March 29th, 2019 at 7:00 pm
I’ve never read any of his thriller novels. I can’t say why, but I’ve stuck to Appleby and this one with Honeybath.
I remember this one only as being ‘fun,’ to use your word, and not much more about it. My experience with Appleby has varied — never dull but one in particular, very very strange,
March 29th, 2019 at 7:03 pm
It may have been APPLEBY ON ARARAT that I found very very strange.
March 29th, 2019 at 8:00 pm
No, I was wrong. It was THE DAFFODIL AFFAIR. Reviewed by me here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1133
March 29th, 2019 at 8:52 pm
Steve, this needs some proofreading.
March 29th, 2019 at 9:04 pm
Found three typos. Hope there aren’t too many more!
March 30th, 2019 at 12:39 am
Michael Innes/J.I.M. Stewart was enormously talented – some of his novels under each name are little masterpieces – yet he didn’t take his talents seriously. He wrote for money and amusement and never tried to do anything more ambitious.
I think being a scholar in English literature made him take himself too modestly – after all, editing Burton and reading James, Conrad, Kipling or Joyce professionally must have affected his perception of what he could do – so he never tried to write anything that couldn’t be knocked off in a few hours in the Long Vac.
March 30th, 2019 at 5:54 pm
Steve,
If you try one thriller by Innes I suggest THE CASE OF THE JOURNEYING BOY and maybe SECRET VANGUARD — they have many of the same virtues of the best of Appleby.
March 30th, 2019 at 6:18 pm
Thanks, David. I’ll definitely keep those two books in mind. I have copies of both.