Local laddie

   

I have yet to read the novels of Michael Innes, though I know both Harriet and Lindsay think very highly of them, but intending to discover them I've begun with an autobiographical work - just to get a feel for the man behind the books. In Myself and Michael Innes J.I.M. Stewart (his real name) comes across as modest, good humoured and very likeable. He writes with great verbal dexterity - if at times he can be a little arch - but he is lively and funny and the book was a great pleasure to read.
    Stewart hailed from Edinburgh and went to the school attended by both R.M. Ballantyne and R. L. Stevenson. When he left that institution (pictured above), the Rector told him that on the basis of his essays he might one day manage a  Coral Island but a Treasure Island would lie "beyond the twitch of [his] tether". In the end he didn't acquit himself badly, and his entry in "175 Accies" (a series of biographical portraits of notable former pupils of the school) mentions "the considerable skill and literary craftsmanship of his detective novels...his important contribution to the thriller genre" and his remarkably wide range.
    The book's scope is idiosyncratic: there is very little of home and family, his distinguished academic career is covered but in parts left without flesh, his fiction is passed off almost without comment (a book would take him a mere six or seven weeks to write), however an entire chapter is an excursus on the detective novel. He drops in sketches such as Hardy's funeral, meetings with T.S. Eliot, the librarian J.A. Symington (so familiar from Justine Picardie's Daphne) friendships with W.H. Auden and A.J.P. Taylor, but all is done unselfconsciously and with a beguiling simplicity. As a result, I'm looking forward to the novels, and as I write about them and other books here, I shall try to keep in mind Stewart's maxim: "a great deal of nonsense is written about literature"!