The Journeying Boy (1949)
Blurb:
My review:
A first-class thriller strongly reminiscent of Hitchcock. Like Innes’s best work, it is “milder sensational fiction, nicely top-dressed with a compost of literature and the arts, which is produced by idle persons living in colleges and rectories”. Happily, Innes avoids his usual habit of having “the situation…degenerate from melodrama into rough-and-tumble farce.”
The plot is told from two (later three) perspectives, and deals with the assassination of a public school teacher and a dazzling scheme of impersonation in order to kidnap a physicist’s son, who is the hero. The boy and replacement tutor are seen from one angle (action / adventure), while the mystery of the tutor’s death is investigated by Inspector Cadover (from What Happened at Hazlewood). This technique of the shift in emphasis adds to, rather than detracts from, the story, and keeps the reader from becoming bored (not that there’s much chance of that in this tale of midnight excursions, dream sequences on trains invoking The Lady Vanishes, and showdowns at burning Irish manor-houses).
The mystery plot is subservient to the thriller, but there is a good scattering of suspicion and doubt throughout. As one of the characters remarks, “the basis of success in this trade is to keep on suspecting everybody all the time. But, of course, there has to be a limit to it.”
And Innes does manage to keep the plot under control, and to make the thriller thrill. Full marks also for the Irish dialogue, which is nearly as good as the Scots in Lament for a Maker.