The Weight of the Evidence by Michael Innes
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
Michael Innes was the pen name of Oxford professor J.I.M. Stewart. This 1943 novel is set in a redbrick university (six were founded in the industrial cities of England in the Victorian era) so it gives the Oxford author a chance to be waggish about provincial British universities of relatively recent founding as distinguished from ancient and venerable Oxford and Cambridge. The period detail is interesting to those of us into between the wars settings. His plots are improbable but I for one cannot resist a demise such as that met by Professor Pluckrose, who has been crushed to death by a meteorite which has fallen on him as he was chilling in a courtyard. This was not the Creator’s finger hitting the Smite Button. Someone shoved the meteorite out of a tower window. Series hero Yard Inspector John Appleby has to find out who and why.
