Lament for a maker

By Michael Innes

Subjects: Police, Sir John Appleby (Fictitious character), Fiction, mystery & detective, police procedural, Fiction, mystery & detective, traditional, Scottish vernacular, England, fiction, Scotland, Appleby, john, sir (fictitious character), fiction, London (england), fiction, Fiction, Scots

Description: This novel records events surrounding the dramatic, snow-bound death of a universally despised Scottish laird - was it suicide, did he fall, or was he pushed? The story is told, at length, by a series of narrators all offering a different viewpoint, and what starts as a simple puzzle builds to a desperate tragedy of Jacobean proportions. If you are looking for a light, 1930s, Christie-style confection to fill a couple of rainy hours, this is not for you. Remember that Michael Innes was a Scottish academic (Professor of English at Adelaide and, later, Oxford University) with an interest in psychology. The book starts with a witty pastiche of the then-popular Scots vernacular fiction - worth sticking with, as it is actually very funny in parts. Tropes from other literary forms are introduced (epistolatory novels, Gothic fiction, Jacobean drama). A character wanders in briefly from the previous Innes books, and Appleby of Scotland Yard makes a late entry to offer a more or less coherent solution. So, not your average whodunnit and possibly not for everyone: an intelligent and witty experiment or pretentious and prolonged, according to your taste. Read it and make up your own mind! P.S. "maker", or makkar, is Scots for "poet"