Hare Sitting Up: A Sir John Appleby Mystery

Almost every author worth his or her salt has had fun with the switched twins plot, from William Shakespeare to Georgette Heyer. In "Hare Sitting Up" (1959), Michael Innes creates two twins who like to play the 'which twin am I' game with their friends---not so much as they used to though, as the Juniper twins have respectable professions now: one is the head of a boys' school; the other is a scientist whose field of expertise is biological warfare. When the biological warfare scientist goes missing, Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) is called onto the case by the highest political powers in the realm. It seems that a deadly bacteriological culture has also gone missing along with Howard Juniper.Once the author has this rather far-fetched plot set up to his satisfaction, his readers are treated to an extended visit to a boys' school, to the decaying mansion of a duck-banding peer, and to the grim, 'prohibited' island of Arday off the coast of Scotland. This novel is a smoothly blended combination of thriller and manor house mystery.One of the antagonists is standard-grade evil, and Innes doesn't spend too much ink on him. The other is truly mad, after a character in D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love:" "You yourself, don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?" H.R.F. Keating in his 1987 book, "Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books," has this to say about our literate Commissioner of Metropolitan Police:"To Appleby one could well apply the words which Michael Innes, writing under his own name [J.I.M. Stewart] in the novella "The Man Who Wrote Detective Stories," employs to describe that hero: 'He loved tumbling out scraps of poetry from a ragbag collection in his mind - and particularly in absurd and extravagant contexts.' " Sir John is in true form in this melodramatic Cold War mystery.

The title from Woman in Love, by D. H. Lawrence with a thought of cleaning the world, with "No more people. Just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up.". This sets the tone for a mystery, with 2 identical brothers, one researching deadly bacteriological culture. Sir John Appleby, with the help of Lady Appleby prowling around an old school attic, is off to solve his disappearance, in his civilized manner. There is a Wild Goose (well really a Wild Auk chase), to a secret island. There is enough fun in this book for everyone, especially bird watchers. There are also literate allusions like when referring to one the eccentricities of one of the characters:. He has " Prospero fantasies. The sense that he has supernatural aerial messengers at his command", which is refers to The Tempest.