The Ampersand Papers

Rating:
Summary: Urbane, elderly Appleby
Review: Sir John Appleby, the detective-hero of Michael Innes's mysteries is knighted, married, and retired from his position as Assistant Commissioner at New Scotland Yard in "The Ampersand Papers (1978)." In fact, one cheeky young constable refers to him as 'well-preserved.'

Sir John enters the noble Diggitt family's mystery at midpoint while strolling beneath the walls of their Treskinnick Castle. The reader has already been introduced to the owner of the castle, Lord Ampersand, his eccentric and quarrelsome family, and his equally eccentric staff. Sir John receives his first introduction to the family and their quarrels as a body hurtles down from the North Tower and lands at his feet.

It is the body of Dr. Sutch, an archivist who has been hired to search for the missing Ampersand family papers, valuable documents that could contain letters from the Romantic poets, Shelley and Byron, and possibly a lost play by Coleridge. Dr. Sutch has also been searching (on the sly) for the legendary Ampersand treasure that was supposedly looted from a wrecked Spanish galleon during the reign of Elizabeth I.

"The Ampersand Papers" twists and turns through many ornate plot lines involving not one, but two missing treasures, a shady archivist, an equally shady speleologist named Cave, and an inbred, upper-class family with a fondness for practical jokes and multi-generational feuds.

The author, John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (pseudonym Michael Innes) was born in 1906 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, and his mysteries reflect both his scholarship, and the year he spent in Vienna, studying Freudian psychoanalysis.

There are few dialogues in the Appleby novels that are more subtle and psychologically revealing than the one between Sir John and Lady Ampersand on the subject of her son and her son's heir. Innes always displays a talent for playful, erudite dialogue, but in this particular scene his readers must delve below the superficial chat about Lady Ampersand's jigsaw puzzle in order discover which of two suspects is really capable of murder.

Even though the mystery seems overly complicated, the psychological portraits are vintage Innes, and each of the conspirators is very satisfyingly hoisted on his or her own petard by novel's end.

Rating:
Summary: Typical Late Innes
Review: The mixture of literary manuscripts, piratical treasure and noble eccentrics makes this typical late Innes, with far more speculation than either detection or action as Appleby investigates the fall of an archivist from the North Tower onto his head (and nearly on A.'s). Although theories of "murder" abound, this turns out to be as ill-founded a belief as that in either of the treasures.