Sir John Appleby is a fictional detective created by Michael Innes in the 1930s who appeared in many novels and short stories.
Appleby had perhaps the longest career of any of the great detectives. He was born in 1907 or 1908 (in Silence Observed he states that his age is fifty-three). He first appeared as a youthful Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard in Death at the President's Lodging (Seven Suspects in the United States) in 1936. He retired from Scotland Yard at a very early age just after World War II, on marrying Judith Raven, a sculptress first encountered in Appleby's End.
He then reappeared as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a position rewarded by a knighthood. Although he later retired to Long Dream Manor, his wife's family home in the countryside, he continued to solve crimes well into the 1980s, his last appearance being in Appleby and the Ospreys in 1986, 50 years after his fictional debut.
In 2010, eighteen previously uncollected short stories appeared in Appleby Talks About Crime.
Appleby also makes an appearance in the Edmund Crispin novel Holy Disorders.
Read more about Sir John Appleby: Appleby Stories
Famous quotes containing the words sir john, sir and/or appleby:
“Here lies the body of Sir John Guise.
Nobody laughs, and nobody cries;
Where his soul is and how it fares
Nobody knows and nobody cares.”
—Anonymous. From Frobisher’s New Select Collection of Epitaphs (c. 1791)
“This is no Sir Galahad who lives from afar. This is a two- legged boa constrictor.”
—John Lee Mahin (1902–1984)
“Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting.”
—Joyce Appleby (b. 1929)