[Michael Innes certainly gave his books a thick] coating of urbane literary conversation, rather in the manner of Peacock strained through or distorted by Aldous Huxley. The Innes books were immediately acclaimed as something new in detective fiction from the publication in 1935 of Death at the President's Lodging, a title with misleading implications for the United States, where it was rather tamely renamed Seven Suspects. The Times Literary Supplement said that he was a newcomer who at once took his place in the front rank and, with the publication of Hamlet, Revenge! (1936), called him "in a class by himself among writers of detective fiction."

There was actually nothing very new about Innes's approach. J. C. Masterman, in An Oxford Tragedy (1933), had produced very much the same kind of "don's delight" book, marked by the same sort of urbanity. But Innes is the finest of the Farceurs, a writer...