J. I. M. Stewart

J. I. M. Stewart
Born	John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (1906-09-30)30 September 1906 Edinburgh
Died	12 November 1994(1994-11-12) (aged 88) Coulsdon, London
Pen name	Michael Innes
Occupation	Professor of English
Language	English
Nationality	Scottish
Alma mater	Oriel College, Oxford
Period	1936 - 1987
Genre	Mysteries, Literary criticism
Spouse	Margaret Hardwick (1932-1979)
Children	5 including Angus John Mackintosh Stewart
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John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (30 September 1906 – 12 November 1994) was a Scottish novelist and academic. He is equally well known for the works of literary criticism and contemporary novels published under his real name and for the crime fiction published under the pseudonym of Michael Innes. Many devotees of the Innes books were unaware of his other "identity", and vice versa.

Biography

Stewart was born in Edinburgh, the son of Elizabeth Jane (née Clark) and John Stewart of Nairn. His father was a lawyer and Director of Education in the city of Edinburgh. Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy, where Robert Louis Stevenson had been a pupil for a short time, and later studied English literature at Oriel College, Oxford. It was here he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer's scholar. In 1929 he went to Vienna to study psychoanalysis. He was lecturer in English at the University of Leeds from 1930 to 1935 and then became Jury Professor of English in the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

He returned to the United Kingdom to become Lecturer in English at the Queen's University of Belfast from 1946 to 1948. In 1949 he became a Student (equivalent of Fellow in other Oxford colleges) of Christ Church, Oxford. By the time of his retirement in 1973, he was a professor of the university. He died at Coulsdon.

Stewart wrote several critical studies, including full-length studies of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Hardy, as well as many novels and short stories. His last publication was his autobiography Myself and Michael Innes (1987).

Michael Innes

Between 1936 and 1986, Stewart, writing under the pseudonym of Michael Innes, published nearly fifty crime novels and short story collections, which he later described as "entertainments". These abound in literary allusions and in what critics have variously described as "mischievous wit", "exuberant fancy" and a "tongue-in-cheek propensity" for intriguing turns of phrase. Julian Symons identified Innes as one of the "farceurs"—crime writers for whom the detective story was "an over-civilized joke with a frivolity which makes it a literary conversation piece with detection taking place on the side"—and described Innes's writing as being "rather in the manner of Peacock strained through or distorted by Aldous Huxley". His mysteries have also been described as combining "the elliptical introspection ... [of] a Jamesian character's speech, the intellectual precision of a Conradian description, and the amazing coincidences that mark any one of Hardy's plots".

The best-known of Innes's detective creations is Sir John Appleby, who is introduced in Death at the President's Lodging, in which he is a Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard. Appleby features in many of the later novels and short stories, in the course of which he rises to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Other novels feature portrait painter and Royal Academician, Charles Honeybath, an amateur but nonetheless effective sleuth. The two detectives meet in Appleby and Honeybath. Some of the later stories feature Appleby's son Bobby as sleuth.

In 2007, his family transferred all the Innes copyrights and other legal rights to Owatonna Media. Owatonna Media on-sold these copyrights to Coolabi Plc in 2009, but retained a master licence in radio and audio rights. Literary rights are currently held by John Stewart Literary Management, and published by House of Stratus.

Bibliography

J. I. M. Stewart

Non-fiction

• Educating the Emotions (1944)
• Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1949)
• James Joyce (1957)
• Eight Modern Writers (1963)
• Thomas Love Peacock (1963)
• Rudyard Kipling (1966)
• Joseph Conrad (1968)
• Shakespeare's Lofty Scene (1971)
• Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (1971)

Fiction

• Mark Lambert's Supper (1954)
• The Guardians (1955)
• A Use of Riches (1957)
• The Man Who Won the Pools (1961)
• The Last Tresilians (1963)
• An Acre of Grass (1965)
• The Aylwins (1966)
• Vanderlyn's Kingdom (1967)
• Avery's Mission (1971)
• A Palace of Art (1972)
• Mungo's Dream (1973)
• A Staircase in Surrey quintet:
  • The Gaudy (1974)
  • Young Patullo (1975)
  • Memorial Service (1976)
  • The Madonna of the Astrolabe (1977)
  • Full Term (1978)
• Andrew and Tobias (1980)
• A Villa in France (1982)
• An Open Prison (1984)
• The Naylors (1985)

Short story collections

• The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories (1959)
• Cucumber Sandwiches (1969)
• Our England Is a Garden (1979)
• The Bridge at Arta (1981)
• My Aunt Christina (1983)
• Parlour Four (1984)

Memoir

• Myself and Michael Innes: A Memoir (1987)

Edited texts

• William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (Penguin English Library, 1968)

As Michael Innes

John Appleby series

Novels

• Death at the President's Lodging (1936) (also known as Seven Suspects)
• Hamlet, Revenge! (1937)
• Lament for a Maker (1938)
• Stop Press (1939) (also known as The Spider Strikes)
• The Secret Vanguard (1940)
• There Came Both Mist and Snow (1940) (also known as A Comedy of Terrors)
• Appleby on Ararat (1941)
• The Daffodil Affair (1942)
• The Weight of the Evidence (1943)
• Appleby's End (1945)
• A Night of Errors (1947)
• Operation Pax (1951) (also known as The Paper Thunderbolt)
• A Private View (1952) (also known as One-Man Show and Murder Is an Art)
• Appleby Plays Chicken (1956) (also known as Death on a Quiet Day)
• The Long Farewell (1958)
• Hare Sitting Up (1959)
• Silence Observed (1961)
• A Connoisseur's Case (1962) (also known as The Crabtree Affair)
• Appleby Intervenes (omnibus volume, 1965, containing One-Man Show, A Comedy of Terrors, The Secret Vanguard)
• The Bloody Wood (1966)
• Appleby at Allington (1968) (also known as Death by Water)
• A Family Affair (1969) (also known as Picture of Guilt)
• Death at the Chase (1970)
• An Awkward Lie (1971), ISBN 0-396-06345-4
• The Open House (1972), ISBN 0-396-06524-4
• Appleby's Answer (1973), ISBN 0-396-06744-1
• Appleby's Other Story (1974), ISBN 0-396-06715-8
• The Gay Phoenix (1976), ISBN 0-396-07442-1
• The Ampersand Papers (1978), ISBN 0-396-07663-7
• Sheiks and Adders (1982), ISBN 0-396-08063-4
• Appleby and Honeybath (1983), ISBN 0-396-08247-5
• Carson's Conspiracy (1984), ISBN 0-396-08395-1
• Appleby and the Ospreys (1986), ISBN 0-396-08950-X

Short story collections

• Appleby Talking (1954) (also known as Dead Man's Shoes)
• Appleby Talks Again (1956)
• The Appleby File (1975), ISBN 0-396-07279-8
• Appleby Talks About Crime (Crippen & Landru, 2010), ISBN 978-1-932009-91-0

Other

• What Happened at Hazelwood (1946)
• From London Far (1946) (also known as The Unsuspected Chasm)
• The Journeying Boy (1949)
• Christmas at Candleshoe (1953) (also known as Candleshoe)
• The Man from the Sea (1955) (also known as Death by Moonlight)
• Old Hall, New Hall (1956) (also known as A Question of Queens)
• The New Sonia Wayward (1960) (also known as The Case of Sonia Wayward)
• Money from Holme (1964)
• A Change of Heir (1966)
• The Mysterious Commission (1974), ISBN 0-396-07134-1
• Honeybath's Haven (1977), ISBN 0-396-07555-X
• Going It Alone (1980), ISBN 0-396-07819-2
• Lord Mullion's Secret (1981), ISBN 0-396-08005-7

Christmas at Candleshoe was the basis for the 1977 film Candleshoe starring Jodie Foster, Helen Hayes and David Niven.

External links

• Obituary, New York Times
• Appraisal of each of Innes's books
• Michael Innes at IMDb
• Link to Michael Innes audio and radio rights, Owatonna Media