Michael Innes, Seven Suspects, Berkley Medallion Paperback F1158, the First Inspector Appleby Mystery, 1965

The Piece

A vintage mass-market paperback with one of the better covers of its decade. The whole face is a flat pillar-box red, and the art is a single joke told perfectly: a black academic mortarboard laid over a heap of bones in the shape of a skull and crossbones, with a door key where the tassel should be, the whole set inside a white shield like a college coat of arms. Chunky white slab type stacks the author's name above the title, and a curved line along the bottom reads AN INSPECTOR APPLEBY MYSTERY.

The back is the same red, headed by a large white 7 and question mark over the publisher's blurb, a Will Cuppy notice, and a list of Berkley's other mystery authors — Nicholas Blake, John Creasey, the complete Conan Doyle. Inside, the paper has aged to a warm cream and the page block has taken on the soft fanned shape a paperback gets from being read rather than shelved. The front matter lists eleven other Innes titles then available in Berkley Medallion editions, each with its own catalog number and 50¢ price.

History & Provenance

This is where Inspector John Appleby begins. Published in Britain in 1936 as Death at the President's Lodging and issued in the United States the following year under this title, it is the first novel Michael Innes ever wrote — the murder of a college president inside a sealed quadrangle, with seven distinguished Fellows to choose the killer from.

Michael Innes was the pen name of J. I. M. Stewart, an Oxford don and literary scholar who wrote detective fiction on the side and effectively invented the donnish mystery: erudite, funny, packed with allusion, set among academics he knew intimately. Appleby ran through nearly fifty books across half a century and rose from Inspector to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, but this is the first case.

The object itself is a document of the American paperback boom. Berkley Medallion, catalog number F1158, priced at fifty cents, printed November 1965 by Berkley Publishing at 15 East 26th Street, New York, under license from Dodd, Mead. Books like this were sold from wire racks in drugstores and bus stations and were never meant to survive — which is exactly why an intact one with its cover art unfaded is worth keeping.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Old paperbacks are the cheapest good-looking thing in the antiques trade. That saturated red and the mortarboard-and-bones shield are genuine mid-century graphic design, and the book earns a spot face-out on a shelf, propped on a mantel, or framed flat as small graphic art. Stacked with two or three other vintage crime paperbacks it makes an instant vignette on a side table or a bar cart, and the red reads beautifully against dark wood, brass, and green paint.

It is also a book you can actually read, which is the better argument. Innes is very funny, the puzzle is properly constructed, and starting at the first Appleby novel means there are almost fifty more waiting if you like it. A note on care: keep it out of direct sunlight, which will fade that red faster than anything else, and store it upright or flat rather than leaning, since the spine is the weak point on a paperback this age. Handle it with dry hands and don't force the covers back — sixty-year-old glue does not forgive.