Death at President’s Lodging by Michael Innes

British murder mystery novels are my go-to comfort reads. There is something very genteel about them. There is no gore or loud action or twists and turns. The plot peels off in oniony layers, there is suspense but it’s never scary. As a reader, you can sip a cup of tea and breeze through a novel and engage your mind pleasantly for a few hours.

Michael Innes’s Death at President’s lodging is the quintessential ‘closed house, limited suspects’ mystery novel – very popular type in that genre. If you have wondered why this genre is popular in England and what is behind the fascination with cold-blooded murders in closed country houses, then you should read The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale.
Summerscale explains how the 19th-century murder at the Road Hill house caught the nation’s fancy and inspired an entire generation of literature. It laid the foundation for the Golden Age of the detective fiction and some of the first detectives in England.

The Plot

The crime happens, as the name suggests, at the President’s Lodgings in St. Anthony’s college. Since this is a college campus and is open to the public during the day, the murderer could be anyone in the village. However, the access to the lodging is limited and controlled by a set of keys which are in the hands of a few people. The access to the college in which the lodge is located is limited at night and controlled by a set of keys, which is again in the hands of a few people. All the possible suspects have air-tight, strangely corroborative alibis.

Michael Innes employs his favorite detective to unravel the case, Inspector Appleby. The detective soon learns that the murdered man was clearly not a popular man (duh!) and that the suspects are a bunch of formidable intellectual snobs. Each of then extremely capable of planning a brilliant murder.

Why I recommend this book is because, after a fairly long time, I felt so absorbed in a puzzle. There is something mathematical about the issue of the keys, and the number of entrances to the college and the sequence of events of the night of the murder. The solution to the mystery is really one of the most imaginative though slightly improbable.

Verdict

Highly recommended. In fact, this makes it to my list of 10 Mystery Novels everyone should read.

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