Shakespeare, farce, and murder
Rating:
5 / 5
Sex rarely rears its oh-so-indiscreet head in mysteries starring Sir John Appleby, Michael Innes's donnish detective. When it does, it is usually adorned in the lineaments of farce, as is the case in "The Long Farewell" (1958).Lewis Packford, the great Shakespearean scholar, has come to marriage late in his bookish career, and it has enchanted him so thoroughly that he goes to the altar twice---without an intervening divorce. When both wives simultaneously descend upon Urchins, his ancestral mansion, he appears to take the easy way out of his bigamous dilemma. He is found in his library (most of Innes's corpses are to be found in libraries) with a bullet through his head, a revolver in his hand, and a suicide note with the ink still wet, by his side. Most appropriately, the suicide note is a quotation from the Bard--not Othello's "Farewell, farewell...why did I marry," as you might expect. It is rather "Farewell, a long farewell..." from Cardinal Wolsey's soliloquy in Shakespeare's "King Henry the VIII" (Act III, Scene 2). Packford had been dropping hints about the discovery of a sixteenth-century Italian manuscript, annotated by Shakespeare himself, as the framework for his "Othello," but this priceless object seems to have disappeared from the scholar's library upon his death. Sir John Appleby finds it difficult to believe that Packford committed suicide (he thinks the suicide note is a bit uninventive for such a brilliant scholar), so he invites himself up to Urchins where he is introduced to the two angry wives, plus a house party of scholars and bibliophiles who were present at the time of death. Might the missing manuscript be connected with Packford's death? Did one of his wives take it upon herself to murder the bigamous bibliophile? Or did Packford really commit suicide? Sir John weighs in to another notable mixture of crime and scholarship, English eccentrics and American millionaires, farce, murder, and crumbling gothic masonry. "The Long Farewell" is a delightful mystery and by the time the body count reached three, even I had fingered the correct suspect.
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