Innes, Michael
Entry updated 25 December 2024. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym used by Scots author and academic J I M Stewart (1906-1994) for his many detective and thriller novels published from 1936 to 1986, often featuring series character John Appleby in various official roles from detective-inspector to Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, and onward through a long, active retirement. Though often fantastical and donnishly whimsical, these tales normally keep sf devices at arm's length or play with them only speculatively. In the comic house-party mystery Stop Press (1939; vt The Spider Strikes 1939), for example, the central puzzle concerns an unidentified Villain's apparent access to the thought processes of a victimized crime-fiction author, including abandoned plot turns and devices never committed to paper; although the solution is ultimately mundane, various Psychological quirks such as paramnesia, multiple personality disorder and babbling in delirium are explored en route and only reluctantly dismissed, as briefly is the possibility of actual Telepathy. The Appleby thriller The Daffodil Affair (1942) centres on a freakish scheme to gain world power in anticipated post-World War Two chaos by exploiting superstition with the aid of paranormally "gifted" animals and humans (not all the latter, it is implied, being fraudulent), plus a supposedly haunted house once investigated by Samuel Johnson, all transported to South America as intended props for a synthetic Religion. An actual sf device emerges in Operation Pax (1951; vt The Paper Thunderbolt 1951), in which the effects of Drugs created by Mad Scientists to eliminate human aggression (the titular operation) are briefly but disquietingly shown. More typically distanced is the speculative threat of Disaster through man-made Pandemic carried by migratory birds in Hare Sitting Up (1959); his apprehension that the worst might happen here inspires Appleby into New Zealander imagery, an adumbration also voiced in the World War Two setting of the earlier, nonfantastic From London Far (1946).
Some of Innes's thrillers, beginning with The Secret Vanguard (1940) and including the non-Appleby titles From London Far (already cited) and his personal favourite, The Journeying Boy (1949; vt The Case of the Journeying Boy 1949), are intensely fantasticated adventures clearly indebted to John Buchan. In what may be a first for crime fiction, the sound of a fatal shot in The Journeying Boy is masked by that of a nuclear explosion – a cinematic effect rather than a real one, during a showing of the invented film Plutonium Blonde. Although Poltergeist activity is presented as a plausible explanation of household disruption in "Poltergeist" (in The Appleby File, coll 1975), this proves to be a criminally motivated deception. The improbable storyline swiftly unpacked in The Gay Phoenix (1976), which is a last homage to Buchan and his use of the Lateral Fantastic (see Fantastika), is a Doppelganger tale; Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885) is evoked.
Of the more literary fictions written by Stewart under his own name, "Poor Chowder" (in The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories, coll 1959) deals ironically with an English family afflicted with massive radioactive contamination from nuclear material unearthed by the titular dog. "Variations of a Theme of Oscar Wilde's", assembled with mostly nonfantastic tales in My Aunt Christina and Other Stories (coll 1983), evokes (though Stewart-like does not name) J W Dunne to explain a painter's ability to create works that depict the future (see Precognition), including a Dorian-Gray-like portrait that drives its sitter mad. Two tales included in Parlour 4 and Other Stories (coll 1986) contain elements of the fantastic: Precognition again in "Pipkin Grove"; and contagious dyslexia that afflicts the whole of Oxford, possibly engineered by a Mad Scientist, in "The Dyslexia Factor".
At least two volumes of the author's nonfantastic Oxford college novel sequence A Staircase in Surrey (1974-1978) feature appearances by Dr J B Timbermill, a figure clearly based on J R R Tolkien. [DRL]
see also: Paul Gallico.
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart
born Edinburgh, Scotland: 30 September 1906
died Coulsdon, Greater London: 12 November 1994
works (highly selected)
series
John Appleby
- Stop Press (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939) [John Appleby: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Spider Strikes (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1939) [John Appleby: hb/]
- The Secret Vanguard (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940) [John Appleby: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Daffodil Affair (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942) [John Appleby: hb/nonpictorial]
- Operation Pax (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951) [John Appleby: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Paper Thunderbolt (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951) [vt of the above: John Appleby: hb/]
- Hare Sitting Up (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959) [John Appleby: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Appleby File (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975) [coll: John Appleby: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Gay Phoenix (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976) [coll: John Appleby: hb/nonpictorial]
individual titles
- From London Far (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946) [hb/nonpictorial]
- The Journeying Boy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949) [hb/nonpictorial]
- The Case of the Journeying Boy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949) [vt of the above: hb/]
collections
- The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959) as J I M Stewart [coll: hb/nonpictorial]
- My Aunt Christina and Other Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1983) as J I M Stewart [coll: hb/Frank Ainscough]
- Parlour 4 and Other Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986) as J I M Stewart [coll: hb/Frank Ainscough]
nonfiction
- Myself and Michael Innes: A Memoir (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987) as by J I M Stewart [nonfiction: autobiography: hb/Gavin Harrison]
links
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