Hare Sitting Up was originally published in 1959 and is the eighteenth book in Michael Innes’ Inspector John Appleby series – the good news is that it’s absolutely not necessary to have read the first seventeen before starting this one! I have read a few of the previous books and they do all stand alone; they are also all very different and this one is different again.

The unusual title comes from Women in Love by D H Lawrence:

“You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

At the time when Innes was writing this novel, which was the era of the Cold War, scientists were developing ways that could make the sort of world Lawrence describes – a world free of human beings – into reality, through means such as nuclear and biological weapons. In Hare Sitting Up, Sir John Appleby is investigating the disappearance of Professor Howard Juniper, a top government scientist who has been conducting secret research into biological warfare. As there’s a chance that Juniper may have taken some of these dangerous substances out of the laboratory with him, it is important that he is found as quickly as possible and with the minimum publicity. Appleby enlists the help of Juniper’s brother Miles, a headmaster at a prestigious boys’ school – and to say any more would start to give too much of the plot away!

This book is more of a thriller than a mystery, although there are elements of both. Due to the short length, once we get past the slow opening chapter, the story moves forward at a steady pace with the action switching between the home of an eccentric ornithologist, an island off the coast of Scotland, and Splaine Croft School, where Miles Juniper works. There’s a great chapter in which Judith, Appleby’s wife, visits the school to look for clues and has to find a way to explore the buildings without attracting suspicion; I like Judith, whom we met earlier in the series, and it was good to see her being entrusted with some investigations of her own.

Reading this novel in the middle of a pandemic made the discussions on the end of humanity and the destruction of the world feel particularly bleak, but the twists and turns which accompany the search for the missing Juniper brother were entertaining and, thankfully, the book was not as depressing as I thought it might be at first! Some parts of the plot were very predictable (I guessed one of the twists very early in the book), but others were very far-fetched and unlikely and, as is often the case with Innes, you have to be prepared to suspend your disbelief. I didn’t like it as much as some of his others, but for a short, quick read I found it quite enjoyable.

Thanks to Agora Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

So far most of the books I’ve read in Michael Innes’ Inspector Appleby series have been very different from each other. Some, like Hamlet Revenge! and There Came Both Mist and Snow, are fairly conventional murder mysteries; the brilliant Lament for a Maker has the feel of a Victorian sensation novel; and The Daffodil Affair and Appleby’s End are so strange and surreal as to defy classification (and are my least favourites of his books). This one, originally published in 1956 as Appleby Plays Chicken, is best described as a thriller with a chase element, making it similar to The Secret Vanguard in that respect.

The novel opens with student David Henchman and a small group of friends from university attending a reading party in the Dartmoor countryside:

A group of young men facing their final examinations within a year; a tutor, ambitious for his charges or merely amiable, prepared to spend part of his vacation in their company; comfortable quarters in some quiet country place, with hills that can be climbed or antiquities that can be inspected in the course of a long afternoon.

Early one morning, David decides to get away from the others for a while and go for a walk in the spring sunshine. Daydreaming as he walks, David fails to pay attention to his map and finds himself approaching the great hill known as Knack Tor. Seeing a column of smoke rising from the top of the hill, he begins climbing up to investigate, but is unprepared for what he finds there – the body of a dead man with a hole in his forehead and a revolver in his hand. As David wonders what to do next, he becomes aware that he is not alone…someone else is up on that hill with him and that someone will stop at nothing to ensure David keeps quiet about what he has seen.

The first half of the book is devoted to one long episode in which David is chased through the countryside on foot, by car and by horse as his pursuers seem to multiply and appear out of nowhere. It’s fun to read and reminded me of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps – but unlike the chase scene in The Thirty-Nine Steps, this one comes to an end before it has time to become tedious. Inspector Appleby then appears on the scene and the whole tone of the novel changes. As Appleby begins to investigate the murder, the other students and their tutor are brought into the story, and with the viewpoint moving away from David Henchman we can begin to piece together what is going on.

The murder mystery aspect of the novel is nothing special, to be honest. There are only a few suspects and the solution is not particularly clever or surprising. This is definitely a book that, if you read it, you will remember not for the mystery but for that long, desperate race across the moors.

Thanks to Agora Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book #1 read for this year’s R.I.P. XIV event.

I don’t think you could accuse Michael Innes of being formulaic – each book of his that I’ve read has been entirely different from the last! I’ve read two recently (The Secret Vanguard and The Daffodil Affair) and thought I would write about both of them in this post.

The first one, The Secret Vanguard, was published in 1940 and is the fifth in the Inspector Appleby series. It is set just before the beginning of World War II and is much more of a spy thriller than a detective novel. Our heroine, Sheila Grant, is on her way to Scotland to visit family when she overhears a conversation between some fellow passengers on the train, one of whom is reciting a poem by Swinburne. Sheila, who happens to be familiar with the poem, knows that it has been misquoted and can’t resist saying so – but when she is captured and held prisoner after disembarking from the train, she wishes she had said nothing. It seems that the misquoted poem contained a secret message and that Sheila is now in possession of information which could make her a threat to some very dangerous enemies.

It’s not long before Inspector John Appleby gets involved and begins to link Sheila’s abduction with the recent murder of a minor poet, Philip Ploss, and the disappearance of a scientist who has been working on a secret formula which could help the war effort. There are lots of twists and turns as Appleby tries to track Sheila and the missing chemist through the Scottish Highlands and Sheila tries to escape from her kidnappers, unsure of who she can and can’t trust. Although it’s all very melodramatic and unlikely, I did find it quite a fun, fast-paced read. However, the constant chase scenes, last-minute escapes and cases of mistaken identity became a bit tedious after a while. A good entry in the series, but not a great one.

The Daffodil Affair isn’t a typical detective novel either. Published two years after The Secret Vanguard, in 1942, the war is an influence on this novel too, but I won’t say much more about that as I would be risking giving away too much of the plot.

In The Daffodil Affair, Appleby and his colleague Hudspith are investigating three separate mysteries, none of which are the sort of thing you would expect two Scotland Yard detectives to become involved in. First, there is the theft of Daffodil, an extraordinary horse who seems able to count and to read minds. Next, there’s the disappearance of Lucy Rideout, a vulnerable young girl who appears to have been lured away from home by promises of a trip to the island of Capri. Finally, and strangest of all, an entire house has vanished from a street in London – a house which is said to have been haunted.

These three strange occurrences may seem at first to be unconnected, but links soon start to emerge and an adventure begins which sends Appleby and Hudspith on a voyage to South America in the company of the sinister Mr Wine. All sorts of paranormal phenomena are incorporated into the story, including telepathy, séances, witchcraft, hauntings and possession by demons. Some of the situations in which our detectives find themselves are quite surreal and implausible, but there are darker undertones too, which is where the war influence comes in. I think Mr Wine’s schemes and actions would have been frighteningly relevant to readers in the 1940s.

Again this is an entertaining novel, but I found it too bizarre to be truly enjoyable. On the plus side, we do see a lot of Appleby, who has a much bigger role to play than he does in some of the other books in the series. Of these two novels, I preferred The Secret Vanguard, but I don’t think I would recommend either of these as a first introduction to Innes. I would start with Hamlet, Revenge! for a good literary murder mystery or Lament for a Maker if you’re in the mood for a novel in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson with multiple narrators and plenty of Scottish dialect. Those are my two favourites so far.