John Innes Mackintosh Stewart

John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was a Scottish novelist and academic, who wrote fiction and literary criticism, and detective novels under the pseudonym Michael Innes. He was born in Edinburgh and studied at the city’s Academy, and later read English Literature at Oxford University. He also studied psychoanalysis for a year in Vienna in 1929. He lectured in English at universities in Leeds, Adelaide in Australia, Belfast and Oxford. He retired from lecturing in 1973.

As an academic, Stewart wrote literary criticism of novelists including James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Hardy.

In 1936 he wrote his first detective novel under the pseudonym of Michael Innes, Death at the President’s Lodging, which introduced the recurring character of DI John Appleby. Many of these novels are light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek. His final novel, Appleby and the Ospreys, was published in 1986. The novel Christmas at Candleshoe was filmed in 1977.

In 1986, Stewart wrote his autobiography, Myself and Michael Innes. John Stewart was married to Margaret Hardwick, who died in 1979, and had five children. He died in South London in 1994.