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    There Came Both Mist and Snow
    There Came Both Mist and Snow
    There Came Both Mist and Snow
    Ebook249 pages4 hours

    There Came Both Mist and Snow

    By Michael Innes

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A Scotland Yard detective investigates when gunfire disrupts an aristocratic family’s Christmas celebrations in this classic British mystery.

    The relatives of Sir Basil Roper are gathering to celebrate Christmas at the family’s ancestral home in Yorkshire. While the ancient estate has remained unchanged for centuries, the surrounding area now features neon signs, a textile mill, and a brewery.

    Even so, Arthur Ferryman is happy to be there and looking forward to a peaceful holiday. Unfortunately, many of his cousins have taken up pistol shooting for a new hobby. Making matters worse, the family learns that Basil plans to sell the place.

    With the mood of the party soured, quarreling begins, and tension mounts. Before you can say, “Bah humbug,” a gun is fired, and one of the revelers is shot.

    Soon, Arthur finds himself assisting Insp. John Appleby with his investigation. Together they must navigate family secrets and grudges to find a shooter before someone else gets a bullet for Christmas . . .

    Originally published s asunder the title A Comedy of Terrors

    Praise for Michael Innes and There Came Both Mist and Snow

    “Highbrow appeal.” —Kirkus Reviews

    “Mr. Innes is in a class by himself among detective story writers.” —The Times Literary Supplement

    “Wickedly witty.” —Daily Mail

    “As farfetched and literary as Sayers.” —The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMay 30, 2023
    ISBN9781504087957
    There Came Both Mist and Snow

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    Reviews for There Came Both Mist and Snow

    3.5/5

    65 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Hilarious, dry dry DRY humor, a bit reminiscent of Terry Pratchett. The denouement in this particular mystery is absolutely absurd -- indescribably funny. Michael Innes is not about "who dunnit", he's about words and language (he was a English professor at Oxford, among other grand places, and it shows): description, characterization, and all with tongue firmly in cheek. I advise reading Innes on an e-reader, because one of the author's quirks is to use archaic terms that no one has used for two hundred years, so it's a real convenience to be able to just click the word for a definition. After a while, this becomes one of the things you love about his books.
    • 3/5
      The book is interesting even if it is a bit slow. The characters are interesting but it takes quite a long time before the action starts.
      I'm a fan of Golden Age mystery but it took quite an effort to keep on reading and sometimes had to go back in order to see if I understood everything.
      Quite a good book but it did not age well and it is more an interesting picture of an era than an engaging mystery.
      Many thanks to Ipso Books and Netgalley
    • 1/5
      I found this self-indulgent and rambling. It is less a crime/mystery, more an intellectual exercise in devising as many solutions as possible from an obscure crime within a limited cast. The book begins with chapters of philosophising wrapped around meagre information about Belrive Priory and the extended family who are gathering there. These family members are variously eccentric, silly, juvenile, self-obsessed or pompous — in short, I found it impossible to raise an atom of interest in any one of them. Three visitors are added to the mix - one who is a bit of a cypher, another who proves to be the most interesting of the lot, and finally Inspector Appleby. There is no sense of realism about the investigation that follows.Michael Innes was a professor English. He had also studied psychoanalysis. And boy, do both show in his writing style. I found it tedious in the extreme, and the only reason I finished it was that I had been sent a free copy in exchange for a review. My one thought when I got to the end was a disbelieving, "Good grief!"
    • 4/5
      Classic British with all the elements you would expect & several twists. Appleby falls somewhere between the lower-class "I know people" & the upper-class "I will solve this with my knowledge of Greek and Latin" detectives of the period. One thing I personally love is having to look up words; made especially easy in the ebook format! Great fun and one of a considerable series.
    • 4/5
      2014 review:
      A fun mystery with a young Inspector Appleby. I haven't been able to pinpoint any literary pastiche this time (but maybe I just don't recognize it) but the there are plenty of suspects and motives which kept me guessing up to the very end.
    • 3/5
      This 1940 Appleby story is very accomplished technically, but I had the feeling that the characterisation and dialogue weren't up to Innes's usual standard. (It's a while since I read any Innes, though, so I might be remembering the others as better than they really are...) There are plenty of more-or-less academic jokes, but they all felt a bit laboured and schoolmasterish, somehow. Possibly that comes from the way Innes has chosen to use a Henry-Greenish "modern novelist" as his first-person narrator: the parody wears a bit thin after a while. On the other hand, as a whodunnit, it's excellent: we're guided effortlessly through what looks like a hopelessly complicated scenario, in which we don't know whether the shooting was really attempted murder or something else. If it was attempted murder, we can't be sure who the intended victim was; we don't even know for sure whether we can trust the narrator. Fun!
    • 4/5
      The second story in the Appleby Omnibus I started last week takes place earlier than the previous novel, published in 1940, and has an entirely different character and tone than One Man Show. Appleby is younger and not married, an active Detective on the force. Rather than an omniscient 3rd person narrator, this novel is a first person narrative by one of the main characters. Early on I had a suspicion about this book that made me think I knew what would happen and who the villain would be. I suspected that this book would be an homage to a famous Agatha Christie novel. In addition to the fun of trying to figure out the clues and guess the puzzle I had a delightful time trying to decide if, indeed, I had been correct in my first assumption or if Innes was trying to lead us on by a ruse to make us suspect that. I even considered the possibility that Innes didn’t even have that book in mind when he wrote this story. Because of all these layered factors I enjoyed this story the best of the three in this book. And the title was very appropriate! Recommended—3 ½ stars.
    • 4/5
      Definitely one of Innes' best. Almost a parody of the "house-party" style of detective story, involving the various branches of the Roper family who gather at Belrive Priory, where inevitably a crime occurs. This time it's not murder but attempted murder (the Amazon description is wrong here) - or is it? Was Basil's annoying relative Wilfred Foxcroft shot in mistake for his host? And why was he shot on the wrong side of his body? Appleby's appearance almost exactly coincides with the crime, and turns out to be highly fortuiitous. Games are played with quotations which turn out to be laced with significance. Although some of the later developments are rather far-fetched, the reader can (hopefully) overlook that.

    Book preview

    There Came Both Mist and Snow - Michael Innes

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