DEEP AND CRISPIN, EVEN

by Nick Fuller

 

In Holy Disorders (1945), there is a description of a clerical bookshelf which contains the works of, “in another but still noble sphere, John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Blake, Margery Allingham, and Gladys Mitchell”. (For that passage I will always feel grateful, since it led me to discover the works of Gladys Mitchell, about whom I will write in another issue.) To these authors, one should add Michael Innes, the visitation of whose Inspector Appleby is dreaded by one Gervase Fen.

Edmund Crispin, the author of Holy Disorders , eight other detective novels and two collections of short stories( Beware of the Trains , 1953; and Fen Country, 1979), was one of those rare writers who was influenced by other writers and made something new out of those influences. In his books, one may find the elaborate locked room problems of John Dickson Carr; the erudition of Nicholas Blake and Michael Innes; the attention to character and place of Margery Allingham; and the rich humour, generosity and imagination of Gladys Mitchell – yet combined with Crispin's own unmistakable voice, brilliantly witty and often scurrilous, to create something new.

According to the biography on the 1958 Penguin editions:
Edmund Crispin was born in 1921 of Scots-Irish parentage. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' and St John's College , Oxford , where he read Modern Languages. He has been a pianist, organist and conductor since the age of fourteen and was for two years an assistant master at a public school. He travelled a certain amount before the war, where he totally failed to prognosticate the subsequent course of events.

Edmund Crispin's real name is Bruce Montgomery, and he is a composer as well as a writer. His recreations are swimming, excessive smoking, Shakespeare, the operas of Wagner and Strauss, idleness and cats. His antipathies are dogs, the French Film, the Renaissance of the British Film, psychoanalysis, the psychological-realistic crime story, and the contemporary theatre. His favourite detective novelist is John Dickson Carr.

His series detective, Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford , and “the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction”, makes his first appearance in The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944). A “long, lanky man” with a “cheerful, ruddy, clean-shaven face” and “dark hair, sedulously plastered down with water, [which] broke out into disaffected fragments towards the crown”, he is arrogant (“‘If [the list of clues] doesn't give it you,' he concluded, comfortable in the assurance that it would do nothing of the sort, ‘then you're an imbecile'”), childish, impatient, given to sudden passions (including lepidoptery and politics) – and energetic, entirely unselfconscious, warm-hearted, and irresistible. Tom Baker (the fourth Doctor Who) would have been the perfect actor for the role. In the early books, much of the police work is done by Sir Richard Freeman, Chief Constable of Oxford, who fancies himself as a literary critic; in the later books ( Buried for Pleasure , 1948, and Frequent Hearses , 1950), by Inspector Humbleby, who also appears in many of the short stories.

Gilded Fly is best described as a Dickson Carr novel channelled through the medium of Evelyn Waugh, since we have both an impossible murder and a satire of academic life similar to Decline and Fall . In fact, the Times Literary Supplement ( 11 th March 1944 ) described it as “a merger between detective story and Oxford novel”, and thought that it was “constantly amusing either because of [Crispin's] wit or else because of his excessive worldliness”. Yseut Haskell, a complete bitch of an actress, is shot dead in the room of one of her lovers, an organist named Donald Fellowes. The death could not have been murder, because of witnesses on the scene; it could not have been suicide, thanks to some clever deductions with the gun and a ring; and it certainly couldn't have been an accident. Fen works out who committed the crime and how it was done three minutes after finding the body, but won't say who did it because he doesn't know why . Ingenious as the crime is, many of the book's delights lie in the amusing digressions which were to become one of Crispin's trademarks. We have here, for instance, an ingenious pastiche of MR James which is also a clever short detective story (and a nod to Gladys Mitchell's When Last I Died in the names of two characters); Fen's demonstration of ballistics in which he suggests shooting his wife; a bald and obscene parrot; and the wonderful joke of Wilkes's monkeys, which copulate “in a normal though acutely embarrassing way” rather than write Hamlet .

Holy Disorders (1945) is a rather more extravagant book. It's an odd mixture of the detective story (lots of inquiries into who was where when Dr. Butler, the Preceptor, was murdered in the (locked) cathedral), the thriller (a gang of Nazi agents in the neighbourhood, attempts on the hero's life, and the kidnapping of Fen), knockabout farce and the MR Jamesian ghost story (Bishop Thurston's diary which recalls “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”) – and yet Crispin pulls off this mixture of genres with aplomb. There are perhaps too many characters; the method is a bit obvious; and the main clues are rather slight, but the atmosphere of nightmarish comedy is maintained to the end, and the murderer's identity is a genuine surprise. Moreover, who would be without the train journey at the start of the book, the joke about the “Hook, Line and Sinker” knot, the scene with Canon Garbin's raven, the “very dull” Black Mass, and the Snark -obsessed Regius Professor of Mathematics?

Crispin's third novel, The Moving Toyshop (1946), is both his best-known and one of his best books. The book opens with Richard Cadogan, a poet possibly modelled on Philip Larkin (to whom the book is dedicated and who wrote a lecture on poetry), finding a dead woman in a toyshop. When he returns with a policeman, the toyshop has been replaced with a grocer's, and the corpse is nowhere to be found. Cadogan calls in Fen, and they discover that the victim was an eccentric old woman who left her fortune to five people described by the nonsense poems of Edward Lear. Most of the book is a chase after these people, but it's great fun. There are a number of literary jokes: the characters play Detestable Characters in Fiction (‘those awful gabblers, Beatrice and Benedick', ‘almost everyone in Dostoevsky', and ‘those vulgar little man-hunting minxes in Pride and Prejudice ') and Unreadable Books ( Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, The Golden Bowl and Titus Groan – a list which, with the exception of Mervyn Peake, draws a resounding cheer from the discerning reader – i.e., me – which is a very Fenian remark). Fen comments several times on the fact that he's fictional (after being knocked out, he recovers by “making up titles for Crispin”, and because the book is published by the Socialist Victor Gollancz, suggests going left in a car chase); and there's a wonderful encounter with a DH Lawrence-spouting lorry driver. Ralph Partridge, who was generally allergic to detective stories but still reviewed them for two decades, complained that it was just as bad as “latter-day Innes, in poking fun at Oxford dons, twitting the proletariat and humorously commenting on life in general, with the addition of a perfectly fantastic plot hurled with total disrespect at the reader” ( New Statesman , 10 th August 1946).

Although I am allergic to Wagner, whose operas I find unrelentingly heavy and tedious (unlike Mozart, whose Don Giovanni is one of the great achievements of man), I enjoyed Swan Song (1947), an account of murder during a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg . It's a more solid and sustained detective story than the last two works, with a locked room murder and an inexplicable poisoning, and a clever reversal of what the reader was expecting. The characterisation is very good, ranging from the serious (the pathetic love of Judith Haynes) to the comical (Fen's colleague Wilkes who does his utmost to send Fen on a wrong track, and a burglar who advises a supposed suicide to “think of the nice birds, and the nice trees, and the nice bloody atom bombs, and all the things what make life worth living”).

Love Lies Bleeding (1948) is one of Crispin's best and most individual novels. Even Partridge admired the book, saying that: “Crispin establishes himself as our leading exponent of ‘Third Programme' detection”, and that:
The plot relies for mystification on purely logical counterpoint, with red herrings rigorously excluded. The characters carry a certain conviction; the style is light and amusing; and Professor Fen's interludes with a comic bloodhound add even a spice of farce ( New Statesman , 12 th June 1948).

Instead of the fantastical Oxford of earlier books, the story takes place in a minor public school in the English countryside, and involves the murders of two teachers and a witch, and a lost Shakespeare play, Love's Labours Won (an extract of which is provided). There is an excellent thriller scene, where Fen is chased through the woods by the murderer, and the ingenious alibi on which the plot relies is perfectly suited to the setting.

Buried for Pleasure (1948) is a bit disappointing. Fen is running for Parliament in a small village straight out of Mitchell, populated by mad vicars, escaped lunatics, non-doing pigs and poltergeists. Entertaining though all this is, the plot – which involves the murders of an ex-prostitute and a policeman – is very slight, and the dodge on which the story relies feels more like a short story blown up to novel length. In fact, there's not really any detection or even any suspects, and so, although the murderer is the least likely person, it all feels very thin.

The downward trend continued with Frequent Hearses (1950), which is undeniably Crispin's worst book, committing what Carr termed the deadly sin of being dull. Members of a leading film family, all responsible for driving a young actress to suicide, are poisoned one by one. Unfortunately, although there are some good scenes (the famous bit in the maze), the plot is very weak. None of the characters are fleshed out; Fen doesn't do very much; and the murderer appears only once.

Fortunately the next book is one of Crispin's best. The Long Divorce (1951) takes place in a village where Fen – posing as Mr. Datchery, a nom de guerre borrowed from Edwin Drood – has come to investigate the activities of two poison pen writers and a couple of murders. We're fully involved with the characters, who range from the serious – Dr. Helen Downing, a woman doctor suspected of the murders – to the comical, such as the innkeeper Mogridge, whose “habit of reading between the conversational lines, instead of accepting what people said at its face value, [made] communication with him almost always degenerate into a maze of cross-purposes” and the members of a dotty religious sect. Fen solves the murders in a bravura display of logic, but the novel's most powerful scene may be one set on a railway bridge.

There was a long silence before the appearance of The Glimpses of the Moon (1977), something of a postscript to his career. It's an extremely long and rambling book, with too many digressions, not all of which are amusing. The humour is also more like Tom Sharpe than Waugh or Innes; we have two nymphomaniacs (one having an affair with her John Thomas), a structure called the Pisser and a comic chase which takes up the last quarter of the book, involves a fox hunt and the accompanying demonstration, and isn't as satisfying as the one in Toyshop . Although the murders are grotesque, with the victim's head chopped off and sent down river, and a second victim dismembered at a fête and his limbs swapped around, we hear too little of them until well into the book, by which time the reader's patience has been tried. The murderer is a surprise, but Crispin doesn't really play fair with the reader.

However, Crispin has given so much pleasure over the years that it would be churlish to complain. Indeed, the only valid complaint can be that he didn't write any books between 1951 and 1977. Who knows what masterpieces he would have written?