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Death at the President's Lodging
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| Price: | CDN$ 10.56 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $39. Details |
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Average customer review:
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1219643 in Books
- Published on: 2002-07
- Original language: English
- Binding: Paperback
- 254 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Born in Edinburgh , John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was educated at Oriel College, Oxford.
After graduation he went to Vienna, to study Freudian psychoanalysis for a year.
His first book, an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne, got him a lectureship at the University of Leeds. In later years he taught at the universities of Adelaide, Belfast and Oxford.
Under his pseudonym, Michael Innes, he wrote a highly successful series of mystery stories. His most famous character is Inspector John Appleby, who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this day. His other well-known character is Honeybath, the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in The Mysterious Commission, in 1975. Stewart's last novel, Appleby and the Ospreys, appeared in 1986.
Customer Reviews
Pushing at the limits of Golden Age detective fiction.
Had Borges ever read this classic detective novel? I'm not suggesting Innes bursts the boundaries of his form like Borges or Chesterton. On its most obvious level, this is a typical product of Golden Age detective fiction - conservative, obviously ideological, a puzzle-like mystery solved by a socially and intellectually superior detective, archly written, set in a socially acceptable milieu (an Oxbridge college) full of the right people, with amusing instances of outright snobbery. But if he doesn't burst his genre's limits, Innes certainly seems to nag at them. Because, in his almost complete abstraction of plot to the exclusion of meaningful character or locale ; in his filtering of third person objective narration with the voices of the narrated; in his continual self-referentiality; in his meaningful allusinism which both focuses on the genre, but also well away from it; in, most importantly, casting doubt on his detective hero and offering a very unsatisfactory solution, Innes seems to be edging towards a position that would allow Borges to launch his metaphysical fantasies, thus undermining the very fundamentals of the genre he's working in.
