The Case of the Journeying Boy by Michael Innes

I love men. Really. (Okay, my love may be 1/2 pity, but I’m not emphasizing it). Men have their own companionable ethos for relating to each other, they have those rumbly voices, and they look nice in sweaters. Reason enough. And I am always intrigued when I get a glimpse into the male world. Despite what you see on tv, groups exclusively male do exist that have nothing to do with football or firefighting. But there’s not much of it visible in popular culture. TV portrays groups of men mostly by their extremes, usually evil ones. The best popular media can find in a bunch of men is a little gentle buffoonery.

But there was a time when the world of men was not so circumscribed. Men used to consort with each other for purposes other than farting and watching porn. Michael Innes’s The Case of the Journeying Boy is a mystery published in 1949, telling the story of a boy and his tutor. The tutor, a fiftyish intellectual whose career has been spent preparing boys for school, is a remnant of the now extinct world of bachelor scholarship, a quiet and cerebral haven for the contentedly womanless. Mr. Thewless, the tutor, is not only the authority for the boy’s studies, but also the father figure whose expertise in raising children is assumed. He quietly opines to himself throughout the novel about the best way to deal with his charge’s problems, without the five pages of musings on the absent father and changing roles of men a current novel would insist on.

Innes’s style is formal and carefully circuitous. He both respects and gently mocks the academic brain of his protagonist. His characters talk around a subject rather than state things directly. He uses the Victorian habit of slowing down his prose during dramatic action. When the tension is high, his sentences become downright turgid. For example, at one point, Mr. Thewless is being followed through a darkened house by two dangerous criminals. Innes describes Thewless walking up the steps toward a light:

And again - and this assuredly was more ominous - he derived no satisfaction from the reflection that he was climbing steadily into a lesser darkness; into what was, comparatively speaking, a medium of light. It was clearly within our friend’s recollection that the upper corridor upon which his own room lay admitted through some system of skylights considerably more of whatever mild moonlight lay without; and moreover that the periodic illumination from the lighthouse lent fleetingly to the scene a quality of which the only description at once compendious and fair would be one free of any hint of inconvenient tenebrosity.

Not the language of a best-seller, but, I must confess, I love it. It is a linguaphile’s thriller, paced for someone who will enjoy the plodding, carefully chosen words as much as the action. Perfect.

The details of the mystery itself, though improbable, are expressed with just the right amount of suspense. We uncover the clues only slightly ahead of the detective, Inspector Cadover, and watching him decipher the clues and make his own guesses is half the fun. There are secret caves and chases, coshes and countless impersonations. Thewless’s character is tested, and a father learns to respect his son. How could it be better?

** I also loved Innes’s From London Far, which I would have read just for the set up: a classics scholar wanders into a tobaccanist’s shop while quoting a favorite bit of poetry. Unknowingly, he has uttered a secret password that sweeps him into a covert world of post-war art theft. Delicious.

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