The name Michael Innes is synonymous with the witty, academic crime novel beloved in the British tradition of mystery fiction. His Inspector Appleby series, which was published over half a century, set a standard for decades and earned for its author a...

J.I.M. Stewart, 88, the Oxford don who wrote 49 mysteries under the pseudonym Michael Innes, died Nov. 12 in Surrey, England. The cause of death was not reported. Mr. Stewart, a fellow of Oxford University's Christ Church College and professor of English literature,...

...

John Appleby came into being during a sea voyage from Liverpool to Adelaide. Ocean travel was a leisured affair in those days, and the route by the Cape of Good Hope took six weeks to cover. By that time I had completed a novel called Death at the President's Lodging (Seven Suspects in the U.S.A.) in which a youngish inspector from Scotland Yard solves the mystery of the murder of Dr. Umpleby, the president of one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University. It is an immensely complicated murder...

If a 19th-century paternity exists for [A Villa in France], it is surely in the mannered accomplishments of George Meredith, who is credited in passing with being the most recent novelist to be studied in the Oxford English School. A Villa in France has that beguiling property—so eminently characteristic of Meredith—of seeming to slide more or less uncontrollably between epochs. This is partly because the characters themselves seem to be based as much on well-known fictional prototypes as on a...

Michael Innes is one of those almost relentlessly-literary mystery writers who are "thick on the ground," as he would say, only in England. In "Sheiks and Adders," his usual hero, Sir John Appleby, the retired head of the London police, is given to what might be called arch ratiocination. He goes to a local fete at Drool Court, for example, merely out of a curiosity to know why Cherry Chitfield's father "was being so intransigent over the detail of a particular piec...