Sheiks and Adders (1982)

1982 Gollancz blurb:

Appleby at the Garden Fête—and in fancy dress at that!

Appleby is back—Sir John Appleby, the brilliant detective who has solved Michael Innes’s greatest mysteries.  Nowadays he’s in happy and very comfortable retirement on his country estate, far from Scotland Yard and remote, one might think, from bizarre crime and the machinations of Big Business.  But when he decides to give his support to a charity fête at nearby Drool Court, he finds himself involved in a very strange affair.

For one thing, it’s a fancy dress affair, which in itself can be confusing.  Appleby turns up as Robin Hood, and so does his friend and ex-colleague, Colonel Pride, the Chief Constable, who at a hint from the Home Office is ‘keeping an eye on things’.  But what puzzles Appleby is the remarkable number of visitors who have dressed up as sheiks—surely well beyond the possibilities of coincidence.

Chitfield, the tycoon owner of Drool Court, has certainly overdone the entertainment: open-air theatre, a brass band, archery, a hot-air balloon, druidic rites (performed by the Basingstoke Druids), and much else.  And when one of the pseudo-sheiks is killed at the archery butts, pierced by an arrow, the entertainment begins to get crazily out of hand.

It’s a tremendous lark—Michael Innes in delightfully light-hearted mood, though through all the comic chaos he and Appleby remain their imperturbable selves.

My review:

It can’t be said that this is great Innes.  Although amusing enough, it is very badly plotted.  The fête setting is jejune and embarrassing, and the plot sags.  Plot?  There is no plot.  “There was something rambling and untidy about the entire situation, a lack of anything that could be called a clear-cut mystery at the centre of it, which was decidedly not to his taste.”  Nothing is done with the sheiks, apart from the problem of why it should “occur to so many men to dress up for Mr. Chitfield’s fête virtually in an identical way”.  When murder does occur, by archery—“thre is a certain hazard to life in archery when conducted in too light-hearted and casual a fashion, since a longbow is quite as lethal a weapon as a revolver”—it is explained in one paragraph, the book then turning into an attempt to smuggle the Emir out of a house surrounded by an unfriendly crowd.  Attempts to involve “a high-level hinterland to the whole affair” by centring the book’s “plot” around a financial crisis involving Middle Eastern oil (“fishing in troubled waters—but with no shortage of oil to pour on them”) do not help.  Shallow and thoroughly bad.

To the Bibliography.

To the Michael Innes Page.

To the Grandest Game in the World.

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