Appleby's End (1945)

Blurb:

My review:

“A series of odd happenings, linked together in rather a complicated way by an obscure and rather literary thread, a booksy thread…”

This is very funny nonsense.  It bears the same relation to the rest of crime fiction (or even to the world of Hamlet, Revenge!) as Patience or The Mikado does to Don Giovanni or Semiramide.  For that is what the book is: a comic opera, nothing more.  So we have villages called Drool, Sneak, Snarl and Yatter (c.f. Cold Comfort Farm’s Howling), a ghastly family of eccentrics towered over by the long-dead intellects of literary relatives; we have rural passions, secret heirs and illegitimate children (by legal marriage); we have an outbreak of witchcraft and sorcery; and, most strikingly, we have cows, dogs and pigs turning into marble statues.  Very improbable, but very funny.

Note that Appleby meets Judith Raven, who, after an episode in a haystack, becomes his fiancée.

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