Creator / Michael Innes

"Michael Innes" was the pseudonym under which J. I. M. Stewart wrote nearly fifty detective novels between 1936 and 1986, a majority of which feature the police detective John Appleby.

His works contain the following tropes:

• Action Girl: Sheila Grant in "The Secret Vanguard" is forced to become one in fairly short order.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: In "The Daffodil Affair", the title character is a horse that, like Clever Hans, can apparently recognise numbers.
• Big Fancy House:
  • Nesfield Court in "The Weight of the Evidence"; the description is at pains to point out how vast and sprawling it is, and it takes Appleby several attempts to find which of the entrances is the one actually in use.
  • The action of "The Open House" takes place in a stately home, which Appleby compares to a smaller version of Kedleston.
• Call to Agriculture: When Appleby marries, he retires from the police with the intention of taking up farming. It doesn't stick.
• Confronting Your Imposter: How Philip Ploss in "The Secret Vanguard" met his end. He was a minor poet who overheard two spies exchanging information disguised as a poem. One claimed it was by Ploss; the real Ploss pointed out that it wasn't, and got murdered for his pains.
• The Cuckoo Lander Was Right: In "Carson's Conspiracy", Mrs Carson, whom everyone considers to be "dotty", seems to be under a delusion that she and Carson have a son by the name of Robin. Carson knows they don't, and takes advantage of this fact in his plans. What he doesn't know is that Robin is actually Mrs Carson's son by a previous marriage.
• Decoy Protagonist / Genre Shift: "The Secret Vanguard" opens as a conventional detective novel might: the first chapter introduces the murder victim, and the second and third have Inspector Appleby beginning his investigation. Then the point of view switches to Sheila Grant, who unwittingly stumbles across a Nazi spy network, and for most of the rest of the book she's the protagonist of a spy thriller.
• Dine and Dash: In "Money from Holme", Cheel does this twice. Once it's incidental to his real purpose of distracting Mrs Holme before she recognises her husband; the other time, he just can't stand his fellow diners and decides to stick them with the bill.
• Evil Gloating: One of the spies in "The Secret Vanguard" tries this on Sheila. Unfortunately for him, she's got a pistol and is prepared to use it.
• Exact Words: In "A Connoisseur's Case", Daphne Binns has a possible motive for murder, if the murdered man had been blackmailing her. At The Summation, Appleby deliberately phrases his question to clear her: "Could he have said or revealed anything which could in any way reflect discredit on anything you ever did?" to which she can truthfully answer "No". He could have cast doubt on her parentage, reflecting discredit on who she is rather than what she did.
• Fauxreigner: In "The Daffodil Affair," Appleby and Hudspith play up their cover story as hard-drinking Australian wool-traders for all they're worth.
• Free-Range Children: In Operation Pax / The Paper Thunderbolt, shoals of them, bicycling through rural Oxfordshire, play a significant part.
• Genre Savvy: Sheila in "The Secret Vanguard". Knowing she's being pursued by a spy ring, she's well aware of what it means when she's asked "Have You Told Anyone Else?", and quickly changes her answer from "No" to "Yes", giving her enough time to escape.
• Haunted House: One gets stolen (dismantled over the course of a few days and reassembled elsewhere) in "The Daffodil Affair". People took a while to realise, because this was in London during the Blitz and the initial assumption was that it had been destroyed by a bomb.
• I Know You Know I Know: In "The Daffodil Affair", Appleby and Hudspith are undercover policemen posing as Australians. The Big Bad knows they're policemen, but is letting them think that he doesn't know. What he doesn't know is that Appleby and Hudspith know he knows.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Cheel's punishment at the end of "Money From Holme" is pretty much what he was inflicting on Holme. Now he's the one who's being blackmailed into painting for a pittance, while his blackmailer gets the money for the paintings.
• Lazy Bum: Lasscock in "The Weight of the Evidence", an academic who's invariably to be found lounging in a deckchair rather than doing any work. His tendency to come down with a 'slight chill' is a running joke among his colleagues.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • At the end of a chapter in "The Secret Vanguard", Sheila steals a motor-boat and escapes from the Nazis' headquarters:
  At this point, she thought, the instalment should end. Will the heroine get away? Come next week and see.
  • In "The Daffodil Affair":
  Hudspith: We're in a sort of hodgepodge of fantasy and harum-scarum adventure that isn't a proper detective story at all. We might be by Michael Innes.
  Appleby: Innes? I've never heard of him.
• Life Imitates Art: In-universe in "Appleby's End". Strange incidents in the villages around Appleby's End seem to be copying the stories of forgotten Victorian novelist Ranulph Raven.
• Love at First Sight: Appleby meets his wife-to-be Judith one evening; the following day they're engaged, with the wedding set for the next week.
• Path of Inspiration: The Big Bad's plan in "The Daffodil Affair" is to create one.
• The Prankster: Professor Pluckrose, the victim in "The Weight of the Evidence", plays spiteful tricks on his fellow academics. As Appleby finds, that gave a lot of people a motive to drop a meteorite on his head.
• Rank Up: Over the course of the series, Appleby rises in rank from an inspector to commissioner of Scotland Yard.
• Reverse Whodunnit: The first half of "Carson's Conspiracy" follows a corrupt businessman as he plans to fake the kidnapping of his (imaginary) son and then himself. Then the second half shows the events as they play out from Appleby's viewpoint.
• Shout-Out:
  • The name of Nesfield Court in "The Weight of the Evidence" — William Andrews Nesfield was a garden designer who worked on the gardens for several Big Fancy Houses.
  • In "Appleby's End", Appleby describes the plot of The ABC Murders (slightly obfuscated) to another police inspector, wondering if they're dealing with a similar trail of crimes intended to obscure the villain's real aim.
  • In "Carson's Conspiracy", Appleby compares Carson's conveniently rare blood type to Alexis's haemophilia in Have His Carcase.
• Shout-Out to Shakespeare: At the end of "Money from Holme", as Cheel's plans come crashing down, he channels Malvolio in Twelfth Night: "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!"
• Split Personality: Lucy Rideout in "The Daffodil Affair" has three personalities: Young Lucy, Sick Lucy and Real Lucy. Appleby kills the first two with carefully-chosen words, leaving Real Lucy in sole possession.
• Spy Speak:
  • In "From London Far" the main character absently quoted a line or two of verse in a tobacconist's. When the clerk gave him a funny look he said simply "London: a Poem." and the clerk, who thought he'd said "London's goin'," replied "Rotterdam's gone" and allowed him entry to what turned out to be a base of operations for some rather high-class art smugglers/thieves.
  • In "The Secret Vanguard" the spies communicate by quoting poems, into which they slip extra verses containing the necessary information.
• Stern Chase: The bulk of "The Secret Vanguard" involves Sheila Grant being pursued through the lonelier parts of Scotland by Nazi spies.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The ending of "Carson's Conspiracy". Who's going to solve the mystery, the official police with their manpower and organisation, or a single retired detective who has his name on the cover of the book, using his knowledge and deductive skills ? For once, it's the official police.
• Tap on the Head: In "Death at the President's Lodging", Inspector Appleby is knocked out by a blow to the head. One of the suspects, an author of detective novels, points out how dangerous it could have been.
• The 'Verse: Though "Money from Holme" is not an Appleby novel, it does include Hildebert Braunkopf, a Funny Foreigner art dealer who appears with Appleby in other books.
• Villain Protagonist: The protagonist of "Money from Holme" is a slimy art critic who sees nothing wrong with fraud or sexual assault. Over the course of the book, this repeatedly comes back to bite him.
• You All Share My Story: At the end of "Money from Holme", most of the other characters in the book, whom Cheel used to his advantage, join forces to put an end to his plans.