Edmund Crispin

• Born: October 2, 1921
• Birthplace: Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire, England
• Died: September 15, 1978
• Place of death: Devon, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Gervase Fen, 1944-1977

Contribution

Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen mysteries are among the wittiest and most literate entries in the genre. Carrying on in the tradition of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, Crispin’s novels fall into that category of British murder mystery in which an amateur sleuth correctly ferrets out the killer from a small group of suspects, baffling the police with his deductive powers. The hallmarks of Crispin’s style are its humor and its playful artifice; he is a writer less concerned with realism than with imaginatively entertaining his readers, and his books are well written, wickedly amusing, and laced with erudite literary references, courtesy of Professor Fen, who sees murder as a grand intellectual diversion. Although psychological motivations figure importantly in his plots, Crispin’s stories are not so much explorations of human nature as cleverly constructed jigsaw puzzles, full of unexpected twists and farfetched conclusions.

Biography

Edmund Crispin is the pen name of Robert Bruce Montgomery. Crispin was born in Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire, England, on October 2, 1921, the fourth child and only son of Robert Ernest Montgomery, a onetime secretary to the High Commissioner for India, and Marion Blackwood (née Jarvie) Montgomery. Reared in the country, Crispin attended the Merchant Taylors’ School in Moor Park and went on to study modern languages at St. John’s College, at Oxford University. Early interests in both music and writing flourished while Crispin was at Oxford, and he participated in all aspects of the university’s musical life, eventually becoming the organist and choirmaster for St. John’s College.

It was also at Oxford that Crispin first turned his hand to detective fiction, writing the first of his Gervase Fen novels, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), while still an undergraduate. After earning his degree in 1943, Crispin taught school for several years before becoming a full-time writer and composer. The success of his Gervase Fen series, which includes nine novels and two collections of short stories, led to Crispin’s appointment as the crime-fiction reviewer for the London Sunday Times, a position he held for several years.

As a composer, Crispin’s works (published under the name Bruce Montgomery) include songs, choral pieces, and a number of film scores, the best known of which are those he wrote for several of the popular “Carry On” comedies. Indeed, for the last two-and-a-half decades of his life, Crispin worked primarily as a composer, editor, and critic; there was a twenty-five year gap between the publication of The Long Divorce (1951) and the final Fen novel, The Glimpses of the Moon (1977). Crispin spent those years living quietly in Devon, where he died in 1978.

Analysis

The novels and short stories of Edmund Crispin are part of a long tradition of mystery writing that has most often been associated with British detective fiction. It is a style of mystery referred to by Dilys Winn in Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion (1977) as the “cozy”—a reference to the eccentric characters, quaint settings, and somehow genteel crimes that constitute its world. Far removed from the tough, streetwise tone of the hard-boiled genre or the detailed, often violent realism of the police procedural, these mysteries are entertaining intellectual puzzles meant to be read on rainy nights with a cup of tea at one’s side.

Crispin’s Gervase Fen series is a leading example of the style. His plots, which unfold in such locations as small English villages, film studios, and Oxford University, feature an impossibly self-assured amateur detective who is able to piece together the details of the crime, outsmart the police, and capture the culprit, usually after a chase dominated by elements of farce and slapstick. The mysteries themselves are in the classic mold, centering on a murder—or two or three—committed within the confines of a closed setting or group. Fen’s task is inevitably to single out the proper perpetrator from a gathering of suspects, all of whom have motives and not one of whom has a convincing alibi.

The appeal of this format is the opportunity it provides for the reader to solve the crime along with the detective; a convention of the genre in which Crispin—with Fen—delights. A recurring scene throughout the series depicts Fen arriving at a solution to the case well before his companions and announcing this fact with undisguised glee; a self-congratulatory stance intended to twit not only his fellow characters but the reader as well. Crispin prides himself on following the rules of fair play, presenting his readers with all the information necessary for them to arrive at Fen’s solution; that the reader is rarely able to do so is a testament to the skill with which Crispin has buried the nuggets of information on which the solution will turn.

Buried for Pleasure

For Crispin, the conventions of the mystery genre are primarily a springboard to his real aim: entertaining his readers with a combination of wit and imagination. Buried for Pleasure (1948) features a character who is himself a mystery writer, and he is first discovered by Fen in a field, acting out a scene he is planning for one of his books. His explanation—“One’s plots are necessarily improbable . . . but I believe in making sure that they are not impossible”—captures the essence of Crispin’s approach to storytelling. “Farfetched” and “contrived” are words that might easily be applied to several of his solutions, were they not so expertly constructed and charmingly told. One always senses in a Crispin novel that the author is gently spoofing the genre itself, abiding by its conventions yet refusing to take them seriously.

The Case of the Gilded Fly and Holy Disorders

This attitude is seen most clearly in the books’ frequent self-referential jokes, a device that begins early in the series with Fen proclaiming in The Case of the Gilded Fly, “ . . . I’m the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction.” It is a pronouncement that at first startles and then delights the reader when it becomes clear that Fen is indeed referring to himself as a fictional character; this remarkable degree of self-knowledge is called into play throughout the series. Holy Disorders (1945) finds Fen dubbing a particular type of knot the “Hook, Line and Sinker” because, as he explains, the reader has to swallow it, while a later book describes Fen lost in thought, inventing titles for Crispin. This playful schism between character and creator is occasionally reinforced by footnotes from Crispin himself, elaborating on or taking issue with a comment from Fen. Crispin’s willingness to shatter his readers’ suspension of disbelief denotes both confidence in his skills as a writer and an engaging notion that, for their author, these stories are an elaborate game, a lark—exactly as Fen’s murder cases are for him.

Gervase Fen

The source of much of the humor and high spirits in Crispin’s work is Gervase Fen himself. Drawing on the time-honored idea of British university dons as brilliant eccentrics, Crispin has fashioned his hero in their image. Fen is indeed brilliant and decidedly eccentric, given to odd hobbies and interests as well as sudden shifts in mood that can find him gloomy and petulant one moment and bursting with manic energy the next. Described as tall and lean with a blithely cheerful manner, blue eyes, and brown hair that stands out on his head in unruly spikes, he is impatient and easily bored, shamelessly immodest, and yet capable of acts of great kindness and goodwill. His wife, Dolly, figures peripherally in the earlier books of the series, and the pair enjoy a happy marriage, although their relationship is never developed. Fen seems to spend most of his time in his private rooms at the university.

Fen’s two abiding passions are literature and detection, but his restless intelligence propels him enthusiastically down a variety of paths, pursuing momentary interests that he picks up and discards like a child in a room full of toys. In Holy Disorders, he has developed a fascination with insects, which he drops, by the time of Buried for Pleasure, in favor of running for Parliament. Love Lies Bleeding (1948) finds him embarking on a project that brings an impish symmetry to the series’ self-reflexive streak: He is writing a detective novel. (Set improbably in the Catskill Mountains, it begins, naturally, “on a dark and stormy” night.) First and foremost, however, Fen is an avid sleuth whose pleasure in his own accomplishments easily equals their brilliance. Interviewed in Swan Song (1947) for an article on great detectives, he declares, “The era of my greatest success . . . may be said, roughly speaking, to extend from the time when I first became interested in detection to the present moment. . . .”

Humor and Mystery

It could be argued that Crispin’s books are as much comic novels as they are mysteries; certainly they owe as much to Evelyn Waugh and H. L. Mencken (two of Crispin’s favorite writers) as they do to Dorothy L. Sayers or Michael Innes, with whom he has often been compared. The sheer verbal wit of the books is extraordinary, present in both the dialogue and the descriptive passages, and the parade of comic figures and incidents ranges from an aging don named Wilkes, who stumbles through several of the stories, leaving chaos in his wake, to the black humor of The Glimpses of the Moon, in which a severed head finds its way into a number of unlikely places. Frantic chase scenes abound in the stories’ conclusions, with Fen leading the way in his beloved rattletrap jalopy, Lily Christine.

Crispin’s humor also extends to the animal kingdom. Love Lies Bleeding features Mr. Merrythought, a senile bloodhound given to sporadic fits of rage; The Long Divorce offers Lavendar the cat, stalker of invisible Martians; and Buried for Pleasure boasts a pig with the instincts of a homing pigeon. It is in The Glimpses of the Moon, however, that Crispin’s four-legged creations reach full flower with a whippet, a tomcat, a tortoise, and a sleepwalking horse. Otherwordly creatures also make an appearance; Buried for Pleasure details Fen’s encounter with a lively poltergeist. Clearly, Crispin’s purpose throughout his books is to amuse his readers as thoroughly as he baffles them, and in this goal he succeeds admirably.

Despite the air of frivolity that characterizes his work, however, Crispin’s humor also takes the form of social satire, and many of his novels offer witty, expertly sketched portraits of a particular community or profession. Oxford—a setting Crispin knew well—figures often in the series, with its pubs, peculiar dons, and eager undergraduates portrayed most affectionately. Indeed, Crispin has given the city a chief constable who is well suited to its academic environment: Sir Richard Freeman, who cares as deeply about literature as Fen does about crime. Three of the books are set in the behind-the-scenes world of the performing arts—the theater (The Case of the Gilded Fly), the opera (Swan Song), and motion pictures (Frequent Hearses, 1950)—with all the egos, petty jealousies, and artistic temperaments that those settings imply. The Long Divorce takes place in a small English village where spite, class distinctions, and violence lurk beneath a seemingly peaceful exterior, while Holy Disorders examines that most benign of settings, a church, and finds it plagued by the same human flaws that exist in the secular world. The Glimpses of the Moon takes on everything from television commercials to modern fiction, and Love Lies Bleeding offers a look at a private boys’ school in which greed leads to murder, and befuddled masters greet every parent with “Your boy is doing splendidly. I have great hopes for him.” Crispin’s sharpest satirical portrait, however, is found in Buried for Pleasure, in which Fen runs for Parliament, loses interest in the election, publicly ridicules the voters, and ends up winning their support.

The Moving Toyshop

Crispin’s mysteries are as well written as they are witty. Indeed, his extensive vocabulary led writer Catherine Aird to comment in an essay on his work that his books are best read with a dictionary by one’s side. A strong grounding in English literature is also of use, as Crispin is among the most literate of mystery writers. Fen, as do many of the characters, quotes liberally from classic works ranging from William Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll, and the majority of the books’ titles are literary references. The Moving Toyshop (1946) finds Fen playing a game he calls “Unreadable Books” (his choices include James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 1759), and two of the novels make use of literary conceits: Love Lies Bleeding, in which Crispin posits the existence of a lost Shakespearean play, and The Long Divorce, which borrows elements from Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).

That Crispin’s writing is so eminently readable is one of the great joys of the Gervase Fen series. Admirers of darker themes and a leaner prose style may quibble with his approach and perhaps opt for the far grittier world of the hard-boiled novels of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, but connoisseurs of imaginative plotting, effortless wit, and an elegantly turned phrase will continue to rank Crispin among the most delectable of mystery writers.

Principal Series Character:

• Gervase Fen , a professor of English language and literature at Oxford University and an infallible amateur sleuth. He is a brilliant, eccentric Oxford don whose powers of deductive reasoning are matched by his wit, impatience, and exceedingly high opinion of himself. By turns childish, charming, irrepressible, and easily bored, Fen is married and a father, although his family plays almost no part in the series.

Bibliography

Aird, Catherine. “Gervase Fen and the Teacake School.” In Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion, edited by Dilys Winn. New York: Workman, 1977. An analysis of Crispin’s most famous character and the British literary tradition in which he fits.

DeMarr, Mary Jean. “Edmund Crispin.” In Twelve Englishmen of Mystery, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984. Critical overview of Crispin’s life and work discussing his distinctive contributions to the history of the British detective novel.

“Edmund Crispin.” In Modern Mystery Writers, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Critical, scholarly essay on Crispin, his cultural significance and ideological investments.

Nover, Peter, ed. The Great Good Place? A Collection of Essays on American and British College Mystery Novels. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Compilation of essays focused on crime fiction set at college campuses or feature academic characters. Provides context for the character of Gervase Fen.

Routley, Erik. The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph. London: Gollancz, 1972. Idiosyncratic but useful discussion of crime fiction in terms of nominally puritanical ideology. Sheds light on Crispin’s work.

Sarjeant, William A. S. “Edmund Crispin: A Memorial and Appreciation.” The Poisoned Pen 3 (May/June, 1980): 3-10. Homage to Crispin provides a brief survey of his work and its significance.