A Private View (1952)

Blurb:

My review:

Minor Innes, but thoroughly entertaining.  It is a mixture of farce, thriller and detective story, set against an art background, enabling Innes to use a stolen Vermeer as the novel’s Macguffin, and to incorporate such characters as the shady art dealer Hildebert Braunkopf, the highly effeminate critic Mervyn Twist, the revolting criminal Steptoe, and the moral fanatic Lady Clancarron, as well as some of the characters from Hamlet, Revenge! (Scamnum Court is now open to the public), and the grief-struck amnesiac lover of the victim.  Humour is excellent, both black (Limbert’s blood dripping through the ceiling onto Zhitkov’s statue) and bawdy (“He was busy with his privates!”); also a farcical fight in a Chelsea junk shop.  The book is complex and well-plotted, with a mystery cleared up in every chapter, and another introduced to take its place.

To the Bibliography.

To the Michael Innes Page.

To the Grandest Game in the World.

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