What "Killed" Crispin? The Creative Life and Death of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, Part Five

"Worth waiting for!" the publisher Gollancz assured Edmund Crispin's fans when The Glimpses of the Moon finally appeared in 1977, twenty-six years after the last Crispin detective novel, The Long Divorce (1951).

Bruce and Ann, husband and wife, 1976

Bruce Montgomery had started the novel as far back as 1965 or 1966, but had been able finally to complete it only after his marriage to his secretary Ann Clements in 1976.  Clements was able to manage her alcoholic husband, difficult as he could be at times. "In many ways," notes Montgomery's biographer, David Whittle, "Ann became Montgomery's nurse, but she was an exceptional woman."  She needed to be in dealing with Montgomery:

"In the 1970s, [Kingsley] Amis recalls  receiving telephone calls from Ann introducing Montgomery who, when prompted by Amis, would reply with no words, just vague noises.  He was probably so drunk that he could not speak.  Amis would keep on trying to get a word out of him, with little or no success.  Montgomery's sister, Shelia Rossiter, recalled visiting Ann to have coffee one morning and arriving slightly early.  Montgomery was still in his dressing gown, drunk and abusive, and demanding to know what she was doing there.  Rossiter could not tell whether this was the effect of the previous night's drinking or because he had made an early start.  From time to time Ann would pack him off to Moorhaven for another course of treatment.  Against Ann's wishes Rossiter visited him, and on one occasion found him more or less crawling up the walls.  Although he had nothing in his hand, he was flicking the ash of an imaginary cigarette and stubbing it out."

Incredibly, Montgomery's so-called "friend" Kingsley Amis (Amis comes out of the Whittle biography as a jealous backbiter in my view) declared himself baffled by what Montgomery saw in Ann, in one letter making what Whittle calls, justly, a "typically ungenerous comment."  Amis, writes Whittle, "thought that someone who had known plenty of attractive film starlets should have had higher standards":

"I say, why's he going to marry that woman with all the teeth, eh?" (this in a letter to poet Philip Larkin, another Montgomery friend).

Kingsley Amis: with friends like these....

Fortunately "the woman with all the teeth" shepherded the rapidly declining Montgomery into finally completing The Glimpses of the Moon.  Was it worth waiting a quarter century for?  Personally, I find it a weak book, a succession of sometimes forced comic vignettes strung together by a frayed murder mystery plot; yet it is nice to see Gervase Fen back in a novel again for one last time, in a bucolic setting and confronting some whimsically oddball characters and situations.

All the emphasis in Glimpses on misplaced body parts in rural surroundings suggests that Montgomery had been reacquainting himself with the works of a fellow Detection Club member he had enjoyed as a student back in the 1940s, Gladys Mitchell (then approaching eighty), particularly her joyously macabre second tale, The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1929).  Gladys Mitchell also was a favorite, incidentally, of Philip Larkin.

The murder victim rests in pieces.

Montgomery bemoans modernization throughout the novel, condemning both the invasion of the countryside by the "South Western Electricity Board [SWEB]" (particularity as manifested in the form of a huge menacingly vibrating pylon--see the dust jacket--known locally, even to little old genteel ladies of the neighborhood, as "The Pisser") and omnipresent television jingles, which evidently have taken over the brain of the seemingly rather simple-minded local Major, who incessantly repeats them.

Something like "The Pisser"?

Whatever one thinks of The Glimpses of the Moon, Montgomery had other creative accomplishments in his generally unaccomplished later years (those past the age of forty).  He edited notable anthologies of both detective and science fiction, contributing as well significant prefaces.  Whittle's Appendix One, "Montgomery and Detective Fiction," profitably examines Montgomery's views of crime fiction.

Although in his own genre writing Montgomery's comic exuberance could overwhelm his commitment to fair play detection (who really cares about the formal puzzle plot in The Moving Toyshop?), as a critic of the genre, "Edmund Crispin" was a passionate and articulate defender of the traditional fair play form, often taking issue with his friend, the crime novelist and critic Julian Symons, who advocated the superiority of the literary "crime novel" over the puzzle-oriented "detective story."

"I'm also faintly discouraged because the 'better' reviewers over here all seem to be highly contemptuous of orthodox detective fiction nowadays," Montgomery wrote the great American crime fiction critic Anthony Boucher in 1960.  "None the less, I'm convinced that there's still a large public for that kind of thing, as opposed to sub-Chandler thrillers, realistic stodge about police routine, or spineless pseudo-profound guesses at criminal psychology; so I shall push on regardless."

Anthony Boucher

In his capacity as a Sunday Times crime fiction reviewer, "Edmund Crispin" proved particularly astute in noting the promise of modern day British Crime Queens P. D. James and Ruth Rendell.  Both women, Whittle notes, wrote him appreciative thank you letters for his critical support:

"There is no one whose encouragement and criticism has meant more to me than yours (the more so because of my great respect for you as a writer)....You have been kind to me from the beginning and it was your generous review of 'Shroud for a Nightingale' which gave me the breakthrough I needed and which seemed so long in coming" (P. D. James, 1977)

P. D. James

"[Y]our two reviews, so generous and enthusiastic, have made me really happy and give me a confidence I sometimes lack." (Ruth Rendell, 1970)

Ruth Rendell

Montgomery was generous to and supportive of other writers (he was also very supportive of Julian Symons' seminal genre study Bloody Murder, even though he disagreed with much of it), yet he bemoaned the path British mystery fiction was taking in moving away from the the detective story and toward the crime novel.  The original idea of the Detection Club, he noted in 1976, had been to get mystery writers "to stop propounding imbecile plots in appalling English" in the manner of the Edgar Wallace/Sapper school of crime fiction; now, rather mortifyingly, the body in his view had become "to all intents and purposes, a thriller-writers' Club."  Despite his concerns about the direction it was talking, however, Montgomery never resigned from the Detection Club, though he did just that--resign--when the Crime Writers' Association in 1976 awarded its coveted Gold Dagger to Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution, a book he deemed "a preposterous and inept pastiche."

Worth quitting the CWA over?

It was at a Detection Club dinner in 1977 that Montgomery's mystery writing friends saw a "clearly very ill and...much reduced figure" of a man.  "His neck was so thin that it was not touching the collar of his shirt, and his voice was so weak that only those close to him could hear what he said," writes Whittle, paraphrasing a 1992 letter form Julian Symons.  At the time, crime writer Josephine Bell (an octogenarian who had begun writing detective fiction back in the 1930s), wrote Ann Montgomery worriedly that at the dinner she had found Bruce "woefully changed."  Bell was right to worry.  Within a year Bruce Montgomery was dead (not from liver failure as many suspected, but from heart failure, the latter organ being unable to withstand the stress of needed surgery on his body).

Certainly the later years of Bruce Montgomery tell a sad tale, but they were not years entirely bereft of accomplishment.  Nor can anything detract from the glittering successes that Montgomery enjoyed in the 1940s and the 1950s with his detective novels and films scores.  Concerning the detective novel, "Edmund Crispin" wrote several delightful and enduring genre classics that will continue to be remembered in the decades to come.  As should be David Whittle's biography, a fine tribute to an accomplished and interesting man.

Dirge for a detective novelist....

Authors Encountered on the Passing Tramp's Recent Trip

The Tramp recently passed through three interesting places on a research trip for his newest book project, a broad study of the transition of the mystery tale from detective story to crime novel (yes, Julian Symons has done this already, but my take on the subject is rather different).

Among the authors I researched are:

Arguably Oklahoma's greatest mystery writer (yes, there are several).

 Highly prolific English writer, active in the mystery field from the 1930s through the 1970s.

More famous for genre writing in another field, she is the subject of a recent biography.

 Do you know recognize these people?  More on them--and Part Five of the Edmund Crispin article--coming soon!

What "Killed" Crispin? The Creative Life and Death of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, Part Three

In his biography of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, David Whittle argues, correctly I think, that the last two Edmund Crispin books from the 1944 to 1951 series--Frequent Hearses/Sudden Vengeance (1950) and The Long Divorce (1951)--clearly evince the author's "growing regard for plot."  One reviewer of Frequent Hearses, Whittle notes, lamented his own previous castigation of the flippancies in the earlier Crispin detective novels:

I railed against his undergraduate cleverness, but now that [Crispin] writes a straightforward crime story without the sparkling digressions and slapstick repartee of his earlier books, I am sorry, as it were, that I spoke.

While I love the manic high spirits of some of the earlier Crispin tales, I find that Frequent Hearses/Sudden Vengeance and The Long Divorce have more than adequate compensations, namely strong plots ladled with rich dollops of humor  (if not quite of the madcap sort).  Frequent Hearses/Sudden Vengeance has amusing satire of the film world (with which Montgomery had become familiar though his highly lucrative film score work), but my personal favorite of the two is The Long Divorce.  In my 1988 Mysterious Press edition of the book I wrote in the back, upon completing the book on October 8th, 1995 (that was long enough ago that I was younger than Crispin when he wrote it), "absolutely brilliant!"--which I think perhaps gives a hint that I liked it.  On rereading it in 2011 I still do, very much.

The epigraph to the novel ("the long divorce of steel") comes from Shakespeare's Henry VIII (there's a play you don't see pillaged for quotations every day).  I won't say more about that, but it is quite cleverly worked into the story.  For some reason the epigraph is omitted in the current Felony & Mayhem edition, which otherwise is as attractive and cleverly designed as all their other Crispin editions.

The Long Divorce takes place in 1950, between the dates of Friday, June 2 and Monday, June 5 (at these respective points Gervase Fen is on his way from and on his way to, appropriately enough in a Crispin novel, a train station).  In the guise of "Mr. Datchery" (bonus points if you know this literary reference), Fen is descending on the village of Cotten Abbas to investigate (at local police request) a rash of poison pen letters plaguing the citizenry.  Just this basic set-up should be more than enough to hook the fan of classic English mystery (it certainly hooked me).

One is right to take the bait Crispin offers with The Long Divorce, because the novel is one of the very best of that ever so enticing literary species, the English village poison pen mystery (probably the best known example is Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger, 1942).

More serious-minded in this novel, Crispin at times casts a sharp, discerning eye over Cotten Abbas and he provides some interesting social commentary on post-war English village life:

Cotten Abbas is sixty or seventy miles from London and obscurely conveys the impression of having strayed there out of a film set.  As with most show-villages, you are apt to feel, when confronted with it, that some impalpable process of embalming is at work, some prophylactic against change and decay which while creditable in itself has yet resulted in a certain degree of stagnation....It all had a prosperous look--but its prosperity, Mr. Datchery thought, was less that of a working class village than that of a village which has been settled by the well-to-do: in a population which could scarcely number more than a couple hundred, it was obviously the invading middle classes that ruled, badly weakened by post-war conditions, but still hanging on.

This sort of keen observation can be found in other 1950s English village detective novels as well, like Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced and Miles Burton's Bones in the Brickfield (as well as a number of tales by Elizabeth Ferrars, a key figure in the replacement of the classic "country house" mystery with the more modern "country cottage" mystery); but The Long Divorce offers a particularly fine instance of such.

As in Buried for Pleasure, Fen again ensconces himself at an inn and encounters a number of interesting characters.  There's Mr. Rolt, the local saw mill owner looked down on by the village elite for his rough ways and determination to locate his mill at a local beauty spot; Rolt's teenage daughter, Penelope, who talks of the romance of throwing oneself in front of a train and who has a painful crush on an unresponsive local schoolteacher, Peter Rubi, a highly intellectual young man of Swiss derivation; Mr. Mogridge, the gossipy and unctuous local innkeeeper; Helen Downing, an Oxford educated local doctor, relatively newly arrived in the village; George Sims, the established doctor; Inspector Edward Casby, the man tasked with investigating the rash of poison pen letters; Colonel Babington, the Chief Constable, desperately trying to break his smoking habit (like the author at the time); Babington's demented cat, Lavender, constantly on the alert for a Martian invasion (yes, you read that correctly); Amos Weaver, evangelical preacher and local butcher; and assorted female house servants, increasingly scarce and precious beings in post-war England.

Soon after Fen's arrival, seemingly a poison pen letter induces Helen Downing's wealthy friend, Beatrice Keats-Madderly, to commit suicide.  Following this dire event, a fatal stabbing occurs, of one of the above characters, who seems to have been close to discovering the identity of the author of the poison pen letters.  Much to her distress, Helen Downing becomes a "person of interest" in the investigation, many pieces of evidence seeming to point to her as the source of the village's troubles.

Crispin lavishes attention on the two primary female characters, Helen Downing and Penelope Rolt; and they are treated not flippantly but seriously, with considerable insight and understanding.  Rolt is an attractive and appealing girl, but she is painfully in love and acutely awkward in her feelings.  For her part, Helen Downing is an intelligent and sensitive woman doctor trying to establish herself in a highly traditionalist village (she bears a certain resemblance to Alida Mountwell, a doctor character in Miles Burton's excellent 1943 village mystery, Murder M.D.--though Mountwell is a more confident individual).

Indeed, with the middle section of the book, Crispin completely shifts the narrative focal point of Divorce from Fen to Downing, sweeping the reader up in Downing's plight, as suspicion starts to focus on her.  This section of the book rather reminds one of psychological suspense novels from the 1950s by such authors as Ursula Curtiss and Margaret Millar.  It is quite effectively done.

Narrative focus shifts back to Fen for the last part of the novel, where he provides a brilliant exposition of the crime.  Fen's deductions are all based on clues fairly presented to the reader, yet in this reader's case, anyway, a lot of these clues were culpably missed!  When Fen departs Cotten Abbas, the Great Detective has restored order to the English village, in the classic fashion so admired by W. H. Auden in his widely-cited (perhaps over-cited) essay on detective fiction, "The Guilty Vicarage."

In so highly praising the fair play plotting of The Long Divorce, I do not mean to suggest that Crispin eschews humor in the novel.  To the contrary, there are numerous amusing sections.  Lavender's anti-Martian mania is inspired, for example, and Colonel Babington's efforts to quit smoking are quite funny.  Crispin also gets in some droll satirical jabs at Continental intellectuals, in the form of the Swiss educationalist Peter Rubi:

"It is good for the children," [Rubi] observed benevolently, "to destroy things sometimes.  If they are allowed to do that, they grow up to be saner people."  He looked politely to Mr. Datchery [Gervase Fen] in confirmation of his doubtful thesis.  "Is that not so, sir?"
"No," said Mr. Datchery.

In my view, both Fen and his creator unequivocally triumph in The Long Divorce.  It would be something of a last hurrah for both Crispin and Fen.  In the final part of this series, I will look at David Whittle's trenchant analysis of what killed--or at least gravely wounded--Crispin's creative impulse.

"I wonder what Gervase Fen would do...."

What "Killed" Crispin? The Creative Life and Death of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, Part Two

To speak of early, middle and late period Crispin when referring to the eight Edmund Crispin detective novels Bruce Montgomery published in the brief eight years that spanned 1944 to 1951 may seem odd; yet, as David Whittle shows in his biography of Montgomery, the Crispin novels sobered up somewhat over the course of those years (even as the author began drinking more).  To be sure, strong humorous elements remain up through the last of this small group of novels, The Long Divorce, yet increasingly the author's tone becomes perceptibly less madcap.

Evidence suggests that by the appearance of The Long Divorce Montgomery was on his way to becoming, say, a more humorous Ngaio Marsh; yet at this point Montgomery's own temperamental indolence led to the commencement of his long narrative silence.  The money he was realizing in the 1950s from his film scores made writing economically unnecessary and, in any event, by the sixties Montgomery, beset with poor health (he smoked heavily all his adult life) and descending into alcoholism, had almost entirely ceased composing as well.  For twenty-five years he promised his publisher, Gollancz, a new detective novel, but this novel, which came to be titled The Glimpses of the Moon, never materialized until 1977, a year before Montgomery's death.

Detection Club Dinner

However, in the late 1940s, Montgomery, still in his twenties, was unquestionably in the prime of his creative life.  In 1947, the year his fourth detective novel appeared, Crispin was invited to join England's august Detection Club, a social organization of the country's finest writers of detective fiction, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and John Dickson Carr.  Fittingly, Montgomery was proposed for membership by his mystery idol, John Dickson Carr. 

The next three Edmund Crispin novels--1947's Swan Song, which deals with the world of opera, and 1948's Love Lies Bleeding and Buried for Pleasure, which concern, respectively, deaths at a school and a country village--are all fine books, reflecting in some respects, as Whittle notes, a greater seriousness on the part of the author, yet still retaining the peerless Crispin humor.  Of the three tales my favorite is Buried for Pleasure, one of the most notable British detective novels satirizing life in a post-war, austerity-era England governed by a Labour party determined to make what it saw as long overdue social and political change in the country (others that come to mind are Miles Burton's Death Takes the Living, 1949, Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced, 1950, and Henry Wade's Diplomat's Folly, 1951).  Montgomery, a lifelong Tory of "strongly conservative disposition" in Whittle's words, obviously was not overly enamored with the Labour party; yet his humor is so winning that readers who may not share that disposition should enjoy Pleasure too.

As the cover of the recent Felony & Mayhem edition of the novel suggests, Buried for Pleasure concerns English politics.  It seems that Fen has rather quixotically gotten it in his head to stand for a seat in Parliament from a country constituency.  When Fen steps out at the train station serving Sanford Angelorum, he finds his quest is met skeptically by his driver, an attractive young woman named Diana:

"Look here," she said, "you're a professor at Oxford, aren't you?"
"Of English."
"Well, what on earth...I mean, why are you standing for Parliament?  What put that idea into your head?
Even to himself Fen's actions were sometimes unaccountable, and he could think of no very convincing reply.
"It is my wish," he said sanctimoniously, "to serve the community."
The girl eyed him dubiously.
"Or at least," he amended, "that is one of my motives.  Besides, I felt I was getting far too restricted in my interests.  Have you ever produced a definitive edition of Langland?"
"Of course not," she said crossly.
"I have.  I just finished producing one.  It has queer psychological effects.  You begin to wonder if you're mad.  And the only remedy for that is a complete change of occupation."
"What it amounts to is you haven't any serious interest in politics at all," the girl said with unexpected severity.

When Fen makes his way into the village and his lodging at The Fish Inn, he meets an amazingly rich gallery of characters; a traditionalist detective novelist likely modeled on his fellow Detection Club members John Rhode (Cecil John Charles Street) and Freeman Wills Crofts ("Characterization seems to me a very over-rated element in fiction," he pronounces); the comely and amiable manageress of The Fish Inn; the owner of The Fish Inn, determined to evade exacting labor regulations by expanding his inn himself, with the help of friends and family--with dubious results; a Socialist lord; the lord's skeptical, phlegmatic butler (who understands Thorstein Veblen much better than his master); Fen's unflappably cynical "old boy" campaign manager; a cleric living in a house haunted by a not altogether frightening poltergeist; an escaped lunatic (at times he thinks he's Woodrow Wilson and is apt to lecture on his Fourteen Points); a chorus of rustics; and, last but certainly not least as things turn out, a "non-doing" pig (always watch out for animals in Crispin, as Whittle points out).

Buried for Pleasure is simply brimming over with a froth of delicious comic richness.  I would venture to characterize it one of the finest English rural comedy novels, even with its murders (not for nothing, as Whittle notes, is mention made of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm).  Yet the fair play murder plot line is capably and cogently managed by the author and engaging in its own right.  And the political satire is masterful.  Fen's anti-Labour parable concerning the practice of the politics of envy during the Cold War (it seems there were three foxes--Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego--who, jealous of each others unique possessions, ended up squabbling until, distracted, they fell "easy prey to a number of cannibal foxes which descended on them from the East and tore them limb from limb") is quite a clever piece of rhetoric, whatever one's views of the politics of the era (Whittle's own discussion of the Crispin detective novels is quite good on the whole, but I was disappointed that this parable--the high point of the political plot--received scant attention from him).

Buried for Pleasure achieves the comic heights of Holy Disorders and The Moving Toyshop, yet it also offers a more controlled mystery plot--a winning combination, in my view.  The last two Edmund Crispin novels from the 1944-1951 period, Frequent Hearses (renamed Sudden Vengeance in Felony & Mayhem's new edition) and The Long Divorce, show signs of further artistic development in a serious direction.  In particular, The Long Divorce offers the best Crispin mystery plot along with a very interesting and seriously presented female protagonist.  More on this novel and Crispin's long years of decline, so instructively chronicled by David Whittle, in Part Three (coming soon, I hope!).

What "Killed" Crispin? The Creative Life and Death of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, Part One

Music composer Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), who as Edmund Crispin wrote eight glitteringly witty and amusing detective novels between 1944 and 1951 (as well as, with Geoffrey Bush, a fellow composer and the son of detective novelist Christopher Bush, the classic short story "Who Killed Baker?") is the subject of a fine 2007 biography by David Whittle, Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School, Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books.  Every admirer of Crispin's mystery fiction (and of Montgomery's music) should want to read this biography, but unfortunately affordable copies are hard to find--the publisher, Ashgate, lists it at $124.95.  It took me four years to find a copy I was willing to buy (at $35)!

Whittle's book was $35 well-spent, in my view, for he writes with insight not only about Montgomery's career in music, but also, more pertinently to this blog, the detective fiction that Montgomery wrote under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin.  Whittle chronicles both the impressive rise of this author--he had published eight novels and twenty-one musical compositions by the time he was thirty-two years old--and his sad decline.  Montgomery's productive life both as an author and a composer mostly ended by the time he was forty, as he descended into alcoholism and the stunted life of "an increasingly remote semi-recluse."

To be sure, Montgomery left us the delightful Edmund Crispin detective novels (all still in print today, courtesy of Felony & Mayhem), but once one has read them one cannot help but wish for more and wonder why Montgomery's creative well dried up so comparatively quickly.  P. D. James, born a year before Crispin, has just published, at the age of 91, a new detective novel and she has been publishing them for a half-century now.  After his first eight detective novels, Montgomery managed only one additional mystery tale, The Glimpses of the Moon (1977), before his untimely death at the age of 56.

The son of a civil servant who rose to become Principal Clerk in the India Office, Bruce Montgomery with one notable exception had a normal, happy childhood and never lost the conservative, bourgeois mindset produced by his upbringing, despite his Oxford education and penchant for gloriously affected Noel Coward-ish picture poses (see below).

The only unhappiness in his childhood came as the result of a "congenital deformity of the feet" from which he suffered--he was born with his feet turned inward--so that he underwent frequent operations up to the age of fourteen and had during that time to wear calipers up to his shins.  Whittle clearly believes that painful consciousness of his physical imperfection inhibited Crispin from having normal physical relationships with women ("he could not be bothered to do what they required," as Whittle tactfully puts it), though he was attracted by them and frequently enjoyed their company,  Montgomery finally married only a couple of years before his in 1978, when he already was in extremely poor health.

Reading locked room mystery maestro John Dickson Carr's brilliant, shuddery Gideon Fell detective novel The Crooked Hinge, Whittle explains, inspired Montgomery while still a student at Oxford to pen his own mystery tale, The Case of the Gilded Fly, at the tender age (for a published author) of 23.  Also influenced by the donnish detective novelist Michael Innes (and his own surroundings), Montgomery made Gervase Fen, the man who was to become his series detective, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford.

Fen quickly became one of the outstanding gentleman amateur detectives of English detective fiction, comfortably rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and Margery Allingham's Albert Campion.  In contrast with these two Crime Queens (and Ngaio Marsh, whose detective Roderick Alleyn, though a policeman, is of the same breed), Montgomery did not make Fen's love life a focal point, but confined the love stuff to secondary characters, who, Whittle notes, tend, rather ingenuously on the part of the author, to fall in love and decide to get married almost on sight.  Fen himself is not really romantic leading man material (he can be vain, faddish and alarmingly blunt and his most prominent physical feature is his "dark hair, ineffectually plastered down with water," that is "stuck out in spikes from the back of his head"--Holy Disorders).

Love interest is not what distinguishes Edmund Crispin mystery tales, but rather intelligence, humor, narrative zest and--more often, I think, than Whittle recognizes--clever fair play plotting.  Edmund Crispin (let us use this name to discuss Montgomery in his authorial guise) has something of the formidable literary intellect of Michael Innes, yet his humor is earthier, less precious, less an acquired taste.  In my view, Crispin is one of the great comedic writers in English detective fiction.

 Such is Crispin's penchant for madcap humor that at times the humorous interludes rather overwhelm the mystery plot (this happens most obviously in the two novels that followed Fly, Holy Disorders, 1945, and The Moving Toyshop,1946).  Of the latter, in modern times routinely declared (by Julian Symons and P. D. James for example) Crispin's masterpiece, a reader for Crispin's publisher, Gollancz, presciently noted that it had "a thin plot....but nobody cares."  In the reader's view, Toyshop rose to glory on the wings of its comic "verve."  Most modern readers would agree, though over the years some detection purists, like Jacques Barzun, have dissented.  "Heaven help you if you're expecting detection," noted a querulous contemporary reviewer.

Holy Disorders also amply illustrates this quality of Edmund Crispin's detective fiction (as does publisher Felony & Mayhem's rather brilliant cover design).  Fen does not appear at all in the first third of the tale, the early action mostly being a succession of brilliant comic set pieces as Geoffrey Vintner, Fen's Watson of the moment, attempts to make his way to the cathedral town of Tolnbridge, where misdeeds are afoot.  It seems dark forces are trying to stop him, and he almost immediately is thrown into a hilarious melee in the sports section of a department store (Fen, who has called for Vintner's aid, has mysteriously requested his friend to get him a butterfly net).

Afterwards, Vintner embarks on a train journey (train journeys in Crispin invariable are delightfully presented), where he meets an assortment of colorful characters, including a psychiatrist who is having a crisis of faith in psychiatry (Crispin's ironic play on the conventional situation of the clergyman losing faith in God), and a vociferous member of the newly energized laboring classes, who demands the right to travel in a first-class carriage ("When we get socialism, see, which is what we're fighting for, see, you and your like will have to show some respect for me, see, instead of treating me like a lot of dirt, see?"--one wonders what the noted leftist Victor Gollancz made of this fellow).

Eventually the mystery plot proper does start to unfold, and an interesting enough plot it is, but probably the highlight of the book is when Fen and Vintner visit one eminent suspect in his home, and find to their bemusement that Poe's poem "The Raven" seems to be materializing before their eyes.  One reviewer deemed Holy Disorders "social comedy with a focus in murder"--which seems a fair enough description!

The mysteries from Crispin's middle period--Swan Song (1947), Love Lies Bleeding (1948) and Buried for Pleasure (1948)--are somewhat less humorously harum-scarum than Disorders and Toyshop, as David Whittle notes, and on the whole are more satisfying as detective novels as a result.  In part two of this review article I will discuss middle period Crispin as well as later period Crispin (represented by Frequent Hearses/Sudden Vengeance, 1950, and The Long Divorce, 1951), and also the long silence that reigned over Edmund Crispin's writing life until, near his death, he finally finished one last Gervase Fen tale, The Glimpses of the Moon, in 1977.  David Whittle is particularly illuminating on Crispin's later life, solving the mystery of what extinguished the man's once glorious creative spark.