Opening a new volume by J.I.M. Stewart always provides one with the reassuring impression that art stopped short somewhere during the leisurely reign of George V. It is like coming off the busy squalor of Piccadilly and pushing back the door of some fusty old London club, where the leather armchairs and the thick Turkey carpets and the dull tick of the old clock seem to belie the existence of the modern world…. [The Bridge at Arta and Other Stories] is as polished and solid as an old mahogany table….

Being one of the most accomplished authors of detective stories in our language, Mr Stewart has no difficulty in concocting improbable and exciting twists of plot whenever he picks up his pen. His delight in Henry James has never prompted him to imitate the Master's curiosity about the puzzling enigmas of human character. His medium is deft caricature, and the division between Michael Innes and J.I.M. Stewart, has, over the years, become so slight as to be inconsiderable. He does not provoke helpless laughter, like P. G. Wodehouse; something more of a chortle, a fruity, slightly donnish smirk is what his stories aim to produce. But like Wodehouse, the world he has created is entirely self-sufficient. The plots hang on lost art treasures, academic jiggery-pokery, macabre twists of fortune in colleges and country houses. And our pleasure in them is neither diminished nor increased by their complete lack of resemblance to anything which any of us would ever have called the real world. The snobbery, for example, of the Stewart world is totally innocent and fantastical. No one here speaks, in Anthony Powell's faintly creepy phrase of 'breaking new ground'. The hierarchy remains as untouchable as that which supports Lord Emsworth. The clever, good-looking plebs go on being plebs. However attractive they may be to males or females of the upper crust, they are happy, on the whole, to leave it that way.