Synopsis
A fatal moment came when Mr Eliot ought to have stopped – and didn’t. After that there was no stopping. Richard Eliot has written bestselling crime novels for years. Begun as means to fund his son’s education at Eton, his protagonist 'the Spider' started out as a cunning criminal and later evolved into an ingenious investigator. Despite the series success, Mr Eliot is tiring of his own invention and is looking forward to retiring. But there’s someone out there who doesn’t want him to stop… When Eliot’s manuscripts start rewriting themselves overnight, it seems the Spider has stepped right off the page and into real life. He commits a crime only to provide an anonymous tip to solve the case. Things get even more bizarre when the Spider starts enacting plots that only ever existed in the author’s mind. Harangued within an inch of his sanity, Eliot calls in Inspector John Appleby to get to the bottom of this twisted game. With the line between fact and fiction so tangled, will Appleby be able to unravel the mystery before the Spider strikes again?
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Born in Edinburgh in 1906, the son of the city's Director of Education, John Innes Mackintosh Stewart wrote a highly successful series of mystery stories under the pseudonym Michael Innes. Innes was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was presented with the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and named a Bishop Frazer's scholar. After graduation he went to Vienna, to study Freudian psychoanalysis for a year and following his first book, an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne, was offered a lectureship at the University of Leeds. In 1932 he married Margaret Hardwick, a doctor, and they subsequently had five children including Angus, also a novelist. The year 1936 saw Innes as Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, during which tenure he wrote his first mystery story, 'Death at the President's Lodging'. With his second, 'Hamlet Revenge', Innes firmly established his reputation as a highly entertaining and cultivated writer. After the end of World War II, Innes returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen's University, Belfast where in 1949 he wrote the 'Journeying Boy', a novel notable for the richly comedic use of an Irish setting. He then settled down as a Reader in English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, from which he retired in 1973. His most famous character is 'John Appleby', who inspired a penchant for donnish detective fiction that lasts to this day. Innes's other well-known character is 'Honeybath', the painter and rather reluctant detective, who first appeared in 1975 in 'The Mysterious Commission'. The last novel, 'Appleby and the Ospreys', was published in 1986, some eight years before his death in 1994. 'A master - he constructs a plot that twists and turns like an electric eel: it gives you shock upon shock and you cannot let go.' - Times Literary Supplement.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
