The Daffodil Affair (1942)
Blurb:
My review:
“We’re in a sort of hodge-podge of fantasy and harum-scarum adventure that isn’t a proper detective story at all. We might be by Michael Innes.”
Utterly
bizarre,
yet quintessential Innes. As with Gladys
Mitchell and G.K. Chesterton, the plot is solid and complex enough,
rendering
what would otherwise be very silly, believable.
Here the bizarre comes in the form of vanishing telepathic
horses,
vanishing schizophrenic lower-class girls, vanishing haunted houses
(investigated by Dr. Johnson) and vanishing modern-day witches—how, the
reader
asks, can Innes fit these disparate elements together?
The plot then shifts to a dream-like
shipboard setting, were Appleby and a (slightly) mad colleague
impersonate
Australians—very funny. At the same
time, the ship is revealed to have as passengers only
those with mediumistic powers, all under the secret
supervision of the sinister psychic researcher Emery Wine.
The plot concludes on Wine’s islands in