Sir John Appleby

Appleby had perhaps the longest career of any of the great detectives. In Silence Observed he states that his age is fifty-three, which, if the action of the book takes place in the year of publication, would mean that he was born in 1907 or 1908. This is contradicted in The Gay Phoenix where he says that he was 29 when he married. He becomes engaged in Appleby's End, published 1945, which would mean that he was born in 1916.

Appleby's background remains enigmatic although certain clues emerge in several novels. He was born in Kirkby Overblow (as mentioned in Hare Sitting Up) and brought up in a back street in a Midlands town (Appleby's Other Story). His grandfather had been a baker and he himself had won a scholarship to university (There Came Both Mist and Snow).

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 sculptor first encountered in Appleby's End. He had two younger sisters, Patricia (Stop Press) and Jane (Operation Pax), both of whom figure prominently in one novel each and then are never mentioned again.

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. For a couple of the later tales his son Bobby serves as the chief protagonist.

In 2010, eighteen previously uncollected short stories appeared in Appleby Talks About Crime.

Appleby is mentioned in the Edmund Crispin novel Holy Disorders and the Isaac Asimov Union Club short story "The Three Goblets."