What Happened at Hazelwood (1946) by Michael Innes

"Michael Innes" was the pseudonym of J.I.M. Stewart, Professor of English Literature, who penned nearly fifty erudite, gently humorous and outright fantastical academic mysteries teeming with literary allusions – often credited with popularizing the donnish detective novel. A popularity that lasts to this day and not entirely without reason.

Innes enjoyed a long-lived career as a mystery novelist who debuted in the middle of the detective story's golden decade (Death at the President's Lodging, 1936) and ended his career by penning the last country house mystery from the hands of a Golden Age writer (Appleby and the Ospreys, 1986). During that five-decade writing career, Innes produced some undeniable, highly imaginative and ambitious classics of the genre (e.g. Lament for a Maker, 1938). Particularly, the first three novels standout as nothing less than first-rate detective stories. Nick Fuller, of The Grandest Game in the World, agrees that "the early books are brilliantly imaginative phantasmagorias" and "show what a really first-class mind can do with the detective story." Regrettably, as Nick observes in "Michael Innes: A Critique," the genius shown in those first novels "only lasted a decade or so before fading" as Innes began to place style over substance. So the wildly imaginative and witty became artificial, unconvincing and tedious while the once dense, carefully constructed plots were turned "vehicles for weak puns."

If you have purist tendencies, when it comes to plots, Innes is uneven at best and frustrating at worst. The reason why the unceasing flood of reprints, translations and an inexplicable fascinating with locked room mysteries so easily directed my attention away from Innes and Inspector John Appleby. However, the fact remained that Innes produced some genuinely good and excellent detective fiction. A perk of reading Golden Age detective fiction in 2023 is how easy it has become to pick and choose. Innes is not exactly obscure nor are copies difficult to find as never appeared to fully gone out-of-print (except, maybe, for the 1990s).

Back in 2018, I tackled Appleby's Other Story (1974) and Nick dropped by in the comments to recommend What Happened at Hazelwood (1946), a comedic melodrama à la Gilbert & Sullivan's Ruddigore, which goes out of its way to be an australiaoutrageous, deliberately improbable spoof of the country house mystery – delivering a "thoroughly bizarre, but, on the story's own logic, quite convincing" solution. Nick left a second comment in 2022 to remind me it has been "three and a half years later and I'm waiting." Well, it took a couple of years, but What Happened at Hazelwood recently made its long-awaited arrival at the peak of Mt. to-be-read.

What Happened at Hazelwood is a parody of the British country house mystery and there are some hints in the story suggesting Innes wrote it with Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) in mind. The backdrop of the story is the ancestral home of the disreputable Simney clan, Hazelwood Hall, whose current master is the most disreputable of the lot, Sir George Simney. When he was a young lad, the then still George Simney was up to no good in Australia, "very likely he had killed a fellow prospector on the gold diggings or drowned in a billabong some rival in a lewd love," until his father and two brothers died in a railway smash. So the baronetcy unexpectedly fell to him. Sir George promptly returned home to take charge of the estate, but did his dark, unsavory Australian past eventually caught up with him? It would explain "the fact that the master of Hazelwood slept with a shotgun at his side" and when his end came it had been "sudden, unaccountable and violent." But he had departed according to tradition: "mysteriously in his library, at midnight, while a great deal of snow was falling in the park outside." The features of the dead baronet "displayed that expression of astounded and incredulous terror only assumed by persons who see that they are about to be murdered in the most pronouncedly bizarre way."

However, to quote the narrator of the first-half, "there will be no corpse available for your inspection, Gentle Reader, until you have struggled on some way ahead" as the first-half necessarily has to introduce the horrid family and recounting all of the ghastly incidents – which immediately preceded the murder of their patriarch. Firstly, there's the unhappy lady of manor, Nicolette, who came from a long-line of actors and actresses which made her "a scarlet woman" in the eyes of the local vicar and her husband's unmarried sister, Grace. The permanents of Hazelwood Hall are Sir George's widowed sister, Lucy Cockayne, who has a 19-year-old son, Mervyn, who plays the role of "beastly little son" known for his "nauseous wit." Sir George also brought back to England a one-eyed butler, Afred Owdon, "who looked much more like a retired pirate than a respectable upper servant." Curiously, Owdon has a 16-year-old son and houseboy, Timmy, who not only looks like a Simney every inch, but is the split image of Mervyn Cockayne ("...possibly because his mother was a Simney..."). Sir George took great pleasure in parading Timmy around the house as one of the family scandals. That would have been a strong enough composition to thicken the plot, but What Happened at Hazelwood is something of family reunion as Hazelwood Hall opened its doors to a number of relatives. I say opened its doors as saying their warmly welcomed would be a lie. Sir George's younger brother, Bevis, has come to stay and nothing bring the brothers together quite like "the ritual business of shooting over each other's land." Bevis brought along his son and aspiring painter, Willoughby, who has designs on the blacksmith's fair-haired. Not just on canvas. But what really disrupted an already disagreeable family get together is the unexpected arrival of their antipodean cousins.

Hippias Simney is a cousin and turned up "loudly declaring that George had in some way cheated or defrauded them," which has something to do with a place called Dismal Swamp back in Australia. Cousin Hippias brought along his young son Gerard and his wife, Joyleen. Sir George and Joyleen immediately get each others attention.

Yes, as the narrator observes, "a crowded stage at the start," but absolutely necessary as the characterization of the dysfunctional Simneys is key to the plot. It has been noted elsewhere Innes depicted not entirely without a glee a whole family worth of suitable murder victims and its to his credit not one of the characters can be described as a theatrical puppet completely devoid of humanity. Some more than others. For example, the victim-in-waiting is a boorish brute, but Sir George showed he had a grasp on the concept of humor in how he, uhm, decorated the walls of his study ("one of his rather offensive jokes"). So the unfolding melodrama remains strangely believable as the drinks and bottles begin to fly across the dinner table, obnoxious cousins get dumped out of windows and secret trysts in the park – while others spy among the trees. This act ends when the body of Sir George is found bizarrely sprawled on the table in his study, like "some preternaturally powerful force from behind had picked him up and flung him across the table," only his toes touched the floor.

It's not Inspector John Appleby who arrives at Hazelwood Hall to take charge of the investigation, but a colleague, Inspector Cadover, who mentions Appleby in passing ("what would Appleby have done?"). Cadover's handling of the case is narrated by a young detective, Harold, who compared Cadover's methods to Darwin's "extraordinary fertility in hypotheses." Going from one hypothesis, or guess, to another until "one of these would look sufficiently promising to be called a theory." The messy murder of Sir George provided fertile grounds for boundless hypothesizing. Such as tracks in the snow below the windows and an unlikely hiding place for a pair of boots, the murky details of the family's Australian past and scandals like the question of Timmy's parentage. Among many other odds and ends, usual and unusual, that continue to complicate the case.

What Happened at Hazelwood threatened to become a little long-winded by the end and really needed to deliver something extraordinarily good or truly exceptional to make it all worthwhile, which gave rise to some skepticism on my part. Somehow, the story came through in the end and delivered something that can be truly called either extraordinarily or exceptional. Either way, the solution certainly is original, but whether, or not, it's any good left me divided. On the one hand, the solution is ingenious, strikingly beautifully in its imagery and logically linked everything together, but, on the other hand, it's hardly a credible explanation. I think it would have been better suited as a false-solution that sounds very pleasing in theory, but falls apart under a critical examination. I suppose you have to take What Happened at Hazelwood on its own terms as a fantastic, melodramatic parody of the country house mystery and according to its own internal logic (the kind of logic you find in a mad dream) the ending makes perfect sense. That in itself is something of a success story. Recommended, if you're looking for something a little different in a thoroughly traditional British country house mystery.