Hamlet, Revenge! (1937)

Blurb:

My review:

Michael Innes is unique in writing four masterpieces in rapid succession.  This is the second, set at one of England’s Stately Homes, and featuring the memorable onstage murder of no less a person than the Lord Chancellor while acting in Hamlet.  Naturally, international implications are rife, and the P.M. is worried—a very young Appleby is sent down.  Everything in the book is a sheer joy—a delight, making this genuinely intelligent novel a book to be read slowly—to be savoured.  As is common with Innes, it is much more than mere mathematical ingenuity.  Innes was a novelist.  The characters are superb, and, despite a huge cast (twenty-eight principals), memorable and distinct.  The detection is first-class: in-depth, but entertaining, and never dull.  The detection culminates in a brilliantly Innesian solution at the end of Part Three.  That and the ensuing events are a dazzling firework display—the firework display of the electric eel.

To the Bibliography.

To the Michael Innes Page.

To the Grandest Game in the World.

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