Anyone read the John Appleby mysteries by Michael Innes?

Cafe Society
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If so, what do you think of them?

I had read one or two over the years, but now that I am getting my books from the library again I have the chance to go at them fairly systematically.

They are in the genre I like, sort of a combination procedural and cozy, where there is a limited set of suspects, and no-one you like is seriously in danger of getting hurt.

Innes’ style can be overly precious sometimes, in that he enjoys parading his scholarly knowledge (in his other life as J.I.M. Stewart he was a literary critic) but it doesn’t get in the way most of the time. One exception is an early work called “Stop Press” which is almost unbearably overloaded with flowery observations on all kinds of things, so much so that the plot sort of disappears for long stretches.

I like Appleby as a character, he seems like a real person without a lot of angst-y personal problems, and he never ever slaps himself on the forehead and says “Oh but I am an imbecile! Why did I not see that sooner!” He is full of aplomb, even when he makes mistakes.

As a side benefit to me of this thread, if you have read and at least partially enjoyed these books, please feel free to recommend other authors and detectives in the same general vein.

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I read most of them back when I was in grad school, and thoroughly enjoyed them. I’ve been toying with the idea of rereading them all. They change in character through the decades…some are more serious, and some are complete farces. There is even one in which the entire mystery and book are an elaborate setup for the outrageous pun in the last sentence of the book.

As for other authors of the same time frame, Crispin’s Gervase Fen mysteries have a similar sort of humor and literary background. The author was a composer in his real life. Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn mysteries are also erudite. Marsh was in theater, and many of the mysteries are set in the theater or art worlds, and some in her native New Zealand.