A Family Affair by Michael Innes

A Family Affair by Michael Innes

Over a period of twenty years, a series of highly elaborate art hoaxes have been perpetrated at carefully time intervals, and in each case, the victim has a very good reason for keeping quietInspector Appleby's interest is kindled by an amusing dinner-party anecdote--when he enlists the help of his wife and son, the ensuing investigation is truly a family affairThe scenes shift swiftly between glorious stately homes and the not-so-glorious art gallery of the irrepressibly dubious Hildebert Braunkopf

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 InnesInnes was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and named a Bishop Frazer's scholarAfter 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 LeedsIn 1932 he married Margaret Hardwick, a doctor, and they subsequently had five children including Angus, also a novelistThe 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 LodgingWith his second, Hamlet Revenge, Innes firmly established his reputation as a highly entertaining and cultivated writerAfter the end of World War I, 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 settingHe then settled down as a Reader in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he retired in 1973His most famous character is John Appleby, who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this dayInnes's other well-known character is Honeybath, the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in 1975 in The Mysterious CommissionThe last novel, Appleby and the Ospreys, was published in 1986, some eight years before his death in 1994