Reading the Detectives discussion

Welcome to our Oct/Nov 23 buddy read of A Night of Errors . Book 11 in the Inspector Appleby series this was published in 1947.

A gruelling night of shrouded motives and confused identities develops when the last of the Dromios is found murdered, with both of his hands burnt off. He was one of triplets, whose brothers had died in a fire forty years previously. Inspector Appleby wrenches the facts from a melodrama in which the final solution is written in fire.

Please feel free to post spoilers in this thread.

At the beginning I found this somewhat disjointed and difficult to understand. Once I got further into it I knew what was going on, but it was so slow going. It is a book that you need to concentrate on, as there are so many characters involved. Maybe it was just me in the wrong frame of mind, but I got to the point where I really didn’t care who killed who and how. At least four of the characters were so alike and the others were females who only had minor roles.
This is the last book by this author that I own, and I just haven’t liked them much so I will not be buying anymore.

I enjoyed this book a lot and feel we’re finally getting into the mainstream of Innes’s style. There are still quirky elements but he’s settling down to a focus on crime. Appleby can be annoyingly cryptic at times but I enjoyed all the complexities of the plot and the head-spinning developments.

The treatment of servants and yokels was a bit distasteful but otherwise it was a pleasure for me to read. I imagine this book would be very hard to follow in ebook version and am so glad I collected Innes through the 1970s and 1980s!

I got that the “buttocks” clue was important but couldn’t for the life of me understand the implications of it. And Innes kept me wondering till the end whether we were dealing with two or three of the triplets. I was a little sad about Geoffrey’s role, though—he seemed jejune but not malign in his handful of scenes.

Innes stumped me and I give him props for that.

I've finished this now - I enjoyed the start but then got rather bogged down and found it rather slow and confusing and disjointed, as Jill said.

I do agree about the treatment of the "yokels", as Abigail said, but I was amused to see that we have a Mrs Marple cropping up, who is nothing like her near-namesake! I think there were nods to some other leading crime writers too among all the literary references, but don't remember them now.

I didn't really care about many of the characters except for Appleby and Lucy, who I felt rather sorry for. I agree this might be a rather hard book to follow as an ebook, so am pleased I was able to borrow a hardback copy from the library reserve.

I have finished my re-read.

I admire Innes' ability to keep all his points in mind, so that the explanation at the end does seem to include all points (or shows why they are not relevant). And how so many people get involved in muddying the waters, committing their own crimes in the wake of the initial murder.

I was left agreeing with Mr Greengrave: it is a terrible tragedy for the three women - Lady Dromio, who has lost all three of her sons, two to murder and one to execution; Mrs Gollifer, whose initial error has blighted her daughter's life, and killed her son; and Lucy, who must have an awful identity crisis, as well as regrets over her relationship with Oliver.

Good points, Rosina! It’s certainly not all fun and games. It would be interesting to see whether Lucy became more acerbic or less as a result of these experiences.

They are not forgotten - Mr Greengrave will take them under his pastoral caring wing - so the book ends with them in mind. But I am pessimistic about any of them managing to recover from the tragedy.