- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz; New edition edition (7 April 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575057106
- ISBN-13: 978-0575057104
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 10.9 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,124,290 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Secret Vanguard (Inspector Appleby)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A Sir John Appleby crime novel, in which his investigations into the murder of a minor poet in the pastoral vein take him to the Scottish Highlands, where he has to deal with an orgy of transvestism, a missing mathematician, and a secret formula in a collection of hastily-scrawled "Caravaggios".
About the Author
Born in Edinburgh in 1906, the son of the city's Director of Education, John Innes Mackintosh Stewart wrote a highly successful series of mystery stories under the pseudonym Michael Innes. Innes was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and named a Bishop Frazer's scholar. After graduation he went to Vienna, to study Freudian psychoanalysis for a year and following his first book, an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne, was offered a lectureship at the University of Leeds. In 1932 he married Margaret Hardwick, a doctor, and they subsequently had five children including Angus, also a novelist. The year 1936 saw Innes as Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, during which tenure he wrote his first mystery story, 'Death at the President's Lodging'. With his second, 'Hamlet Revenge', Innes firmly established his reputation as a highly entertaining and cultivated writer. After the end of World War II, Innes returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen's University, Belfast where in 1949 he wrote the 'Journeying Boy', a novel notable for the richly comedic use of an Irish setting. He then settled down as a Reader in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he retired in 1973. His most famous character is 'John Appleby', who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this day. Innes's other well-known character is 'Honeybath', the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in 1975 in 'The Mysterious Commission'. The last novel, 'Appleby and the Ospreys', was published in 1986, some eight years before his death in 1994. 'A master - he constructs a plot that twists and turns like an electric eel: it gives you shock upon shock and you cannot let go.' - Times Literary Supplement.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Secret Vanguard
This is Innes's first excursion into the John Buchan territory of the chase thriller. It's set most picturesquely in the Scottish Highlands and features a very attractive heroine and one of Innes's most colourful supporting characters in Harry McQueen, the blind violinist. The book starts deceptively very much in the vein of later and funnier Appleby mysteries with a strange murder of a minor poet, which gives occasion to some hilarious conjectures on Appleby's part, culminating in his visit to the Dr. Borer library, which must rank highly among the funniest scenes Innes ever achieved. Then comes the chase proper, and things change course very drastically. Innes himself rated the chase sequences of THE SECRET VANGUARD rather highly in his autobiography, but the pity is that they seem to belong in another story. The change of tone between the hilarity of the early intrigue and the mostly serious chase scenes does not strike me as quite comfortable. Some of these scenes are indeed excellent on their own terms, and bring to mind rather David Balfour's wanderings in KIDNAPPED than Buchan's quite sloppy prose, but they do not sit very well with some of the other stuff, most notably the final action climax involving an orgy of transvestism on the part of some characters whom one wishes to retain more of their dignity. That said, it's still an excellent read as everything Innes wrote, and it was exciting enough to keep me reading into the small hours until the book was finished; but not my favourite Innes by a long chalk.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Review
6 Dec 2001
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Nazis in a Forsaken Garden
2 Sep 2001
"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!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A thriller involving erudite Nazis
23 July 2006
"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!
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!
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