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....

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.