Edmund Crispin (Robert Bruce Montgomery)

* Tosca was fine -- has a good murder plot and I saw it at the age of 14 at the Baths of Caracala in Rome; Turandot sucked with all that Ping-Pong stuff -- saw that at the Metropolitan in NY a few years ago. On a tangent here, but how can one appreciate opera as stage work, as opposed to straightforward music (I love arias on records), when you have to stomach a huge black woman like Jessye Norman, beautiful as her voice is, pretending to be a young Chinese princess? And how could one perceive such a gross man as Pavarotti as a lothario (although in real life he apparently is)? Staged opera is absurd. I could listen to Kirsten Flagstad all day on earphones, but couldn't sit more than half an hour through a Wagner stage production. Joyce Grenfell summed up all that nonsense. I also despise Broadway Musicals, though I've seen several more of them than operas. Gilbert and Sullivan is OK -- the spoken bits, not the music -- but sort of boring. The few composers who actually wrote music (in my ears) include Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and the two S's Schubert and Schumann. Polyphonic church music is also great. -- And the Beetles.

• * The Case of the Gilded Fly (UK title: Obsequies at Oxford) (1945, shamefully misprinted as 1954 in US Avon edition) -- Brilliant debut, starting with the first chapter describing the train journey to Oxford after Didcot Junction and the introduction of the main characters on that typically dreadful and normal trip: compare this with Dexter's Inspector Morse series about Oxford* for a nice contrast but also an indication that nothing has really changed there in 50 years, except for car traffic problems and housing developments. Then some really nice stuff about repertory theatre and the tribulations of rehearsals and actors' vanity/rivalry (shades of Ngaio Marsh and Simon Brett). As a bonus, there is a very nice ghost story à la M.R. James told by an ancient, doddery, and drunken old don -- that great character Wilkes who appears in many of the Crispin stories.
  
  
• Holy Disorders (1945) -- A 'spy' novel taking place during the War in a small west-country cathedral town (imaginary, but beautifully evoked). 'A preposterous gallimaufry of hobgoblins and spies', as one of the characters puts it, and the book contains those elements and some amusing farcical scenes. Again, there is another M.R. Jamesian interlude -- an old bishop's diary -- that is very effective. Fen, however, is extremely irritating, as he often can be. Amusing that Crispin, talking about Fen's fondness for 'outdated American slang', should think 'cover up' falls in that category -- this (not meaning 'place a cloth over') is now part of the English language wherever it's spoken. Plotwise, one could call this a 'locked cathedral' mystery.
  
  
• * The Moving Toyshop (1946) -- Pure jeu d'esprit, an extravaganza involving what the title says, which is really an elaborate (and stupidly implausible, from any standpoint) scam on the part of the villains. Very frenetic chasing around by Fen and others, reminiscent of Carr's The Blind Barber and other farces by that author. A lot of fun, but not a very good mystery as such. Still you can't help cheering on all these idiots, especially since the villain is a Jane-ite*. And it all ends up on a merry-go-round like 'Strangers on a Train'.

  * Fen likes to play pub games like 'name the most unreadable books' [e.g., Ulysses], 'who are most objectionable characters in books that weren't intended to be so' [those scheming bitches in Pride and Prejudice], and 'what are the worst lines in Shakespeare' [O, Gloster, hast thou lost thine other eye? -- you know, the squish vile jelly bit in King Lear]. This could be a fun thing to do if you have a literate enough crowd -- and if you can't come up with something right away you have to chugalug.

• Swan Song (1947) -- An amusing romp among the cast of an opera troupe in Oxford (although as an ignoramus about opera as opposed to drama, most of the allusions went over my head), where of course the victim is a vain ass whom everybody hates. Towards the end, after a well-rendered description of a nightmare (another M.R. Jamesian moment), there are some very moving elegiac passages about various characters, Crispin's approach into seriousness from the flippancy of the earlier books. Well done, but somehow unsatisfying -- maybe it's the absurdity of the locked-room method. Ironic ending in that the victim murders his murderer.
  
  
• Love Lies Bleeding (1948) -- Set in a boys' school (Crispin, among other things, had been a schoolmaster), this is basically a serious mystery -- very little in the way of farcical happenings -- involving a lost Shakespeare play*. However, the elaborate rigmarole about alibis is over-elaborate, boring (10:57 x at y, 10:58 m at n, etc.), and implausible. In fact, the theft in the school lab and the attack on the schoolgirl is ridiculous, as is that business with the blood trail and the dog. The characters are mostly undistinguished and undifferentiated, unusual for this author. Definitely not my favorite Crispin.

  * As always happens in stories involving 'lost manuscripts', it gets destroyed in the end. I can see why, because if it survived you would have heard of it by now (ha!), but this is so predictable an outcome that one almost doesn't want to read further once it is known that this is a plot element, especially if the particular 'lost' author is one you particularly like. At least Crispin gives you a brief sample of this one (Love's Labours Won) in his skillful pastiche manner.

• Buried for Pleasure (1949) -- Gervase Fen runs for Parliament. A nice village cosy, but a rather implausible mystery plot. Fen's campaign speech, when he calls the British electorate apathetic dolts, is amusing and of course has an effect opposite to what he intended. Many critics consider this his best book (I did, once, but on re-reading have reconsidered).
  
  
• * Frequent Hearses (1950) -- Murder in a film studio, so there's opportunity for some good satire as the author knew all about this, being a film-score composer. In any case, this is a beautifully rendered detective story (even if there are no 'impossible crimes'). The murderer certainly had justification for what he did, so one is glad that he sort of got away with it. Shades of M.R. James ghost stories, again, but Crispin does this so well when he essays it, in addition to his farce moments. The scene in the hedge-row labyrinth/maze with the girl pursued by the killer is one of the most effective and spooky scenes in the literature (night beast stalking and peering at you from the adjacent alley as you are frantically running around hopelessly lost) -- much better done than the Blair Witch thing in Love Lies Bleeding.
  
  
• * The Long Divorce (1951) -- For some reason, this is Crispin's last detective novel until the 1970's. Why he abandoned the genre for so long is puzzling -- but he did. This is one of his best, with Fen a deus ex machina as Datchery and no silliness about that absurd car Lili Christine (although in disguise he permeates the book like one of those old Greek gods, watching over and interfering in the human comedy). This is a poison-pen mystery in a fine country village, as Crispin does so well, but untypically more forensic, if that's the word -- lots more rigorous police routine, well researched, than in the other books. The premise, however, even if it might have worked for the killer in the provinces in the early 1950s, would never stand now. Characters in this novel are really well delineated. There are also passages of descriptive prose that stand out (as they did in all Crispin novels); such as this nice bit:
  "...[she] was alone in her house by the churchyard, fighting down panic. Outside the windows...clouds were hastening across a yellowish sky. During the past hour they had multiplied much as a rabble, scenting riot or loot, will multiply in city streets, and now, in drunken-seeming confusion, they were being driven reeling towards the east by the wind's pursuit, their shadows flickering on the mounds and stones of the waiting dead like unquiet ghosts...But the sun had disappeared, and in its place a moon just past the full hung flat and unreal behind the hurrying vapours, passing them, it seemed, in listless or hostile review..."

  I've seen skies like that, haven't you?
  
  

• The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) -- After a long hiatus (quarter of a century!), the author published his final Gervase Fen novel, and, frankly, it sucks as a mystery -- too complicated and absurd. (Maybe Crispin was very ill by that time, or this was an early unpublished effort, quickly revised, but I have no idea. This was no Curtain -- Christie's last Poirot, written in her heyday and salted away for the delight of her fans -- and that was released before her death, because even the richest authors cannot afford to leave good unpublished works lying around and not earning royalties: Poirot's 'Death Revealed' rated a front-page obituary in the New York Times and what can be more satisfying to an author than something like that?) That aside, the book opens well, in a pub (as should be in a Crispin book), and develops nicely, but then it just seems to bog down as a reprise of Buried for Pleasure. There are some very funny scenes, just too many, involving the anti-Papist vicar, the electric pylon called the Pisser, and the bizarre behaviour of the German amazon, named Ortrud, wife of a pig farmer. It is a little more up to date in the sense that 'dirty' words and sexual innuendos were more allowable in 1977 than they were in 1949 (not that Crispin was ever prudish).

Short Stories

• Beware of the Trains (1953) -- Short anecdotal stories (3-4 pages) of the sort that used to appear in British newspapers such as The Evening Standard, with twist endings. All but two of these 16 stories involve Fen and Inspector Humbleby. They all follow the 'fair-play' principle, except for the ones Crispin says in his preface 'require some fragments or near fragments of technical information on about the level of the average newspaper quiz'.
  
  
• Fen Country (1979, posth. collection) -- This has the famous story "Who Killed Baker?" which ranks right up there with some classic O. Henry's. A lot of the stories, but not all, involve Fen, but again mostly fall into the anecdotal rather than the atmospheric sort. Anthologists looking for classic short detective stories should look into this collection (and the other) for material, instead of just reprinting the standard Father Browns and Agathas.