The Secret Vanguard

In 1939, a minor poet called Philip Ploss is murdered at his home near London and a young Scottish woman travelling to visit relatives near Perth hears somebody on the train misquoting Swinburne. The connection puts her in deadly danger.

Part mystery and part spy story in the style of "The Thirty-Nine Steps", for me it's not one of Innes's best, though I am always willing to enter his world of urbane intellectuals and characters hovering on the borders between eccentricity and outright lunacy. This world probably never existed but as a teenager I desperately wanted to be part of it.

A WWII thriller, with mystery elements, but more 39 Steps than detective novel.The core chapters follow a young heroine as she gets enmeshed in a secret Nazi invasion plot. Innes being Innes has everyone quick to recognize passing references to Horace and quote accurately and extensively from Swinburne. Stretching credulity even further, one saboteur creates a handful of extra lines to encode a secret message on the fly, and someone else encodes a secret formula by ordering a set of sketches, which Appleby immediately picks up on. Those elements aside, the running around is fun, in an 1930s black-and-white film sort of way.

Mildly recommended.

I didn't enjoy this book. It was a challenge to finish reading it. I found the story difficult to follow and it was tedious at times. The language is dated, I could not deciper many colloquialisms used in the text.

This fifth Appleby book starts off as a typical police procedural -- with a corpse and a policeman. However, it quickly veers off into a spy thriller somewhat reminiscent of John Buchan. Enjoyable but a bit dated.

This is not a bad mystery but unfortunately it didn't age well and it shows the influx of the time when it was written.
It is more interesting as a documentation of a specific historical time than as a mystery.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Ipso Books

This was the third Appleby mystery in the omnibus. It was also published in 1940, and seemed to be the earliest one written of the three. The story takes place in Scotland shortly before the outbreak of WWII. A young woman traveling on a train to visit relatives overhears a man quoting a poem by Swinburne and realizes that he has added an extra verse, which she finds puzzling and amusing. But this chance encounter catapults her into the middle of a plot that involves famous scientists, German spies, and the stealing of secrets. It was an entertaining romp with a lot of action and surprises that were reminiscent of [The Thirty-nine Steps] and some of Helen MacInnes’ books written about this era. Recommended for a rainy afternoon—3 stars

Not the best of the series. Scotland and spies!