The Secret Vanguard

Rating:
Summary: Nazis in a Forsaken Garden
Review: "The Secret Vanguard" (1940) is an early Appleby, and almost pure adventure. Nazi spies communicate with each other by quoting poetry aloud on the British Rail system (I found this is a bit unbelievable---why didn't they just slip notes to each other in the lavatory?)

A poet is murdered near London after hearing himself misquoted on a train, and Inspector John Appleby of New Scotland Yard is delegated to solve the crime.

On another train in Scotland, this story's heroine, Sheila Grant notices that the Swineburne poem quoted by a traveling companion had a couple of extra lines added to it. She makes the mistake of pointing this out to another man in her compartment:

"'It was odd," said Sheila, "that he should put in four lines of his own.'

"'Lines of his own?' The man opposite looked at her in large astonishment.

"Sheila nodded.

"'Where the westerly spur of the furthermost mountain/ Hovers falcon-like over the heart of the bay.'

"'They began like that. And if you happen to know about Swinburne of course they stick out a mile.'"

Of course.

Sheila's misplaced erudition involves her in a desperate chase across Northern Scotland. She is abducted, escapes, meets a blind poet who explains the meaning of the false Swinburne, and finally encounters Appleby, who is chasing poetical clues of his own.

There is a bang-up climax involving the British Army, a very well organized group of Nazi sympathizers, and a gaggle of little old ladies who happen to be lunching at the castle where everything falls apart for the bad guys.

H.R.F. Keating in his 1987 book, "Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books," says this about our literate Detective-Inspector:

"To Appleby one could well apply the words which Michael Innes, writing under his own name [J.I.M. Stewart] in the novella "The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories," employs to describe that hero: 'He loved tumbling out scraps of poetry from a ragbag collection in his mind - and particularly in absurd and extravagant contexts.' "

Still---Nazi spies who quote Swineburne's "Forsaken Garden" on a British train----really, Professor Innes!

Rating:
Summary: Review
Review: Although Michael Innes' Buchanesque thriller The Secret Vanguard (1940) is straightforward and predictable, it marks an important turning point in Innes' career. Having written several donnish detective stories of outrageous complexity, Innes turned his attention to the thriller, in the manner of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps and Nicholas Blake's The Smiler with the Knife-and the result cannot be highly praised.

The book opens well, with the inexplicable murder of a particularly harmless and wholesome poet-a beginning both intriguing and humorous, with Appleby actively detecting. "And yet this element-the intellectual element, you may term it-is not the thing's main fascination." With the beginning of Chapter 4, originality is thrown to the winds, as Appleby and detection are replaced with the story of Sheila Grant, a heroine on the run in Scotland-"untroubled by whatever issues-grave they might be or petty merely-hung upon the strange intrigue on which she had stumbled. She was escaping; she was manoeuvring; she was going to turn the tables yet. It was the game of games. On just this all games ever invented were exactly based." Actually, this "game" was "exactly based" on John Buchan... The Scottish setting is not up to the level of Innes' earlier Lament for a Maker, nor up to Gladys Mitchell's standards, despite the evocation of "a smell of peat and bell-heather and true heather and pine-needles thick upon the ground." As in The Journeying Boy, the story alternates between Appleby and Sheila Grant. Sheila Grant having been introduced, Appleby fades into the limelight, doing very little until very late in the book, when an outrageous transvestite battle takes place.

The elements of the plot are not themselves distinguished: poetry and espionage, and inadequately combined. Poetry is used by spies to convey secret information before witnesses-"a smart way of going about something plumb crazy", it is termed, but the idea of poetry used to conceal hidden messages is an old one, and not up to the standards of either Dorothy L. Sayers or H.C. Bailey. This being a thriller-and a W.W.II propaganda exercise-there are German spies in abundance, all chasing after Sheila Grant. This simplicity of plot is summed up in Sheila Grant's reflection that "the follies of governments, the obsoleteness of controlling minds, the responsibility which two hundred million people bore for letting such control be ... were but a difficult penumbra round an immediate situation which was mercifully simple and clear."

Too simple and clear for my liking-a disappointment after the earlier masterpieces; and, despite this simplicity, it is apparent that Innes has been leaving loose plot ends.