What connects a beautiful girl with a Botticelli face and the improbable name of Astarte Oakes to a hitherto unknown - and now missing - Rembrandt? How can a forgery be a forgery? Sir John Appleby is posed these two conundrums before being summoned from a dinner party to the scene of a murder.
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What connects a beautiful girl with a Botticelli face and the improbable name of Astarte Oakes to a hitherto unknown - and now missing - Rembrandt? How can a forgery be a forgery? Sir John Appleby is posed these two conundrums before being summoned from a dinner party to the scene of a murder.
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Very good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! Greener Books.
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Seller's Description:
This is an ex-library book and may have the usual library/used-book markings inside. This book has soft covers. In good all round condition. Please note the Image in this listing is a stock photo and may not match the covers of the actual item, 150grams, ISBN:
Michael Innes (the pen name of J.I.M. Stewart) is one of my favorite English language stylists of the 20th century. Sinuous, flexible and effortlessly elegant, his prose is refreshingly free of all influence by Strunk & White. He wrote a long series of what one blurb justly calls ?erudite and witty? detective novels, of which this is a thoroughly typical representative.
It involves high-stakes art forgery, and literary forgery carried on for lesser stakes, but with all the greater innate humor. As always its characters seem to have the entire range of English poetry and literature on tap for instant recall. This is always impressive to watch, and may even have been not totally unrealistic in an age when upper students learned Shakespeare word-for-word and regurgitated it at the slightest hint of conversational relevance the way my generation spouted Beatles and Dylan lyrics, and Firesign Theater. Stewart himself ended his career as an Oxford professor of literature, and we can be flattered to be treated as if our proficiency in his subject were equal to his own.
Silence Observed involves a double mystery effortlessly and convincingly resolved into one by Innes? usual detective, John Appleby. Innes fans who?ve not yet read this one may pick it up with confidence their expectations will be fulfilled.
