Stop Press

Rating:
Summary: Also known as "The Spider Strikes"
Review: "Stop Press" (1939), the fourth Detective Appleby mystery is basically a British comedy of manners wrapped inside a thriller about international arms dealers, enclosed in a whodunit that Mary Roberts Rineheart would have been proud to acknowledge. In fact if a mysterious prankster called the Spider is substituted for Rineheart's Bat---well, Innes adds unique touches of his own to a weekend in the British countryside gone awry.

Popular author, Richard Eliot, has written numerous detective novels, featuring 'The Spider', a daring, clever criminal in earlier books, and an equally clever private investigator in later ones. But when the Spider comes to life--first to burgle an eccentric neighbor, then to harass the author's family, and finally to attend his own birthday party-- Inspector John Appleby is called up from London by his sister (I believe this is the only Appleby novel in which she appears) to discover the fictional creature's mundane identity.

Inspector Appleby makes a dramatic entry into Rust Hall during a mysteriously contrived black-out and begins to sort out a very large cast of characters, including a psychiatrist, a growling ghost writer, feuding Oxford professors, Eliot's publisher, an actor, a ne'er-do-well brother, a herd of pigs, an art-collecting arms-dealer--well, the list goes on and on. I had to read "Stop Press" twice in order to fix its dramatis personae firmly in mind. It's not the best Appleby novel but it is certainly the most complex.

The mystery itself is cluttered with subplots, and the solution is rather contrived. Read "Stop Press" for its slowly building atmosphere of terror. Rust Hall and later, Shoon Abbey are lovingly detailed architectural monstrosities that serve as the brooding lairs of The Spider. One might even categorize this novel as 'Early Appleby Gothic.'