Lost in the Fens

Should you really never judge a book by its cover? Had I gone along with that dictum years ago I would not have happened upon Edmund Crispin. Shameful though it is to admit it, I was attracted not by the name of the author – unknown to me – but by a Penguin Crime jacket. Its green and cream design caught my eye at an Amnesty International book sale in the church opposite our house. Our dining-room had recently been redecorated, and I judged Frequent Hearses would, suitably displayed, tone with the colour scheme. First published in 1950, this was a 1987 paperback edition, apparently untouched. Not for long; once I’d handed over £1.50 I couldn’t resist a look inside, and by the seventh sentence I was entranced:

The cross-country journey is prolonged and tedious, involving four changes – at stations of progressively diminishing size and increasing antiquity, so that the effect is of witnessing a dramatized History of the Railways in reverse . . .

This was crime fiction with a difference. But who was Edmund Crispin? A brief blurb told me that his real name was Bruce Montgomery; ‘Edmund Crispin’ was borrowed from a character in one of Michael Innes’s Inspector Appleby novels, Hamlet, Revenge! As well as writing he had been a composer of film scores and concert music, and until his death in 1978 lived in Devon ‘in a quiet corner whose exploitation and development he did his utmost to oppose’. I loved the way this author wrote and wondered why I had never heard of him. ‘Forgotten Authors’, a 2008 piece in the Independent by Christopher Fowler, supplied an answer: ‘Nobody wants to be thought of as vanished, but shelf-life is fleeting.’ Crispin, one of Fowler’s Forgotten, was ‘an important critic and editor but best of all he wrote the Gervase Fen books, 11 dazzling, joyous volumes, all but one of which were produced between 1944 and 1951’. I trawled second-hand bookshops and later the Internet for further Fens. The protagonist of Frequent Hearses and Crispin’s eight other novels (there are also two collections of short stories) is an Oxford professor who moonlights as an amateur detective. The Moving Toyshop (1946) describes him as ‘a tall, lanky man, about forty years of age, with a cheerful, lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face. His dark hair, sedulously plastered down with water, stuck up in spikes at the crown.’ He has children and, according to The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), a wife: ‘a plain, spectacled, sensible little woman incongruously called Dolly’. He sports ‘an extraordinary hat’, headgear which is referred to in subsequent books though the nature of its singularity is never explained. He drives a small red sports car, ‘exceptionally strident and dissolute-looking’, with Lily Christine III painted in white across the bonnet, collects insects in his wardrobe – part of the dénouement of Holy Disorders (1945) – quotes the White Rabbit (‘Oh my ears and whiskers!’) in times of stress or astonishment, and is ‘habitually rude to everyone; it was a consequence . . . of his monstrous and excessive vitality’. In other words, an overgrown, very intelligent schoolboy. As for Crispin (I’ll keep calling him that; it’s easier than rechristening him Montgomery), he was born in 1921 to an Ulsterman father – a civil servant – and a Scottish mother, his upbringing being what he described as ‘conventionally middle class . . . For all its limitations, decent bourgeoisism seems to me not at all a bad or unreasonable code to live by – or to write by, either.’ At St John’s College, Oxford, he took a BA in Modern Languages and was, for two years, its organ scholar and choirmaster, keeping a grand piano in his room.

I must have seen [him] on my first morning in St John’s in 1941 coming out of his staircase in the front quad to go to the bath-house [recalled Kingsley Amis, a friend and contemporary]. This man, along with an indefinable and daunting air of maturity, had a sweep of wavy auburn hair, a silk dressing gown in some non-primary shade and a walk that looked eccentric and mincing.

The Noël Coward-ish affectations were self-inflicted, the distinctive gait not so; Amis later discovered that it was caused by a congenital deformity of both feet. According to another friend, Philip Larkin, to whom The Moving Toyshop is dedicated:

He was lazy but with a far more brilliant brain than I. He was expected to get a First by nearly everyone, and the responsibility weighed on him, driving him to the bar of the Randolph, but rarely to his desk and books.

And – Larkin again – ‘Beneath this formidable exterior, however, Bruce had unexpected depths of frivolity.’ To which end, he badgered Victor Gollancz with novels, all of which bounced back until The Case of the Gilded Fly. Written in the Easter vacation of 1943, it was a locked-room mystery inspired by John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge. Over the next few years, Crispin produced book after book like a magician releasing doves from the sleeve of his gown. Characters in The Moving Toyshop include a student, Hoskins, who is ‘large, raw-boned and melancholy, a little like a Thurber dog’. There are funny, silly, literary jokes; at one tense point in the proceedings Fen initiates a game of ‘Detestable Characters in Fiction’ – step forward ‘Lady Chatterley and that gamekeeper fellow’, ‘Those awful gabblers, Beatrice and Benedick’ and ‘Almost everybody in Dostoevsky’. I won’t spoil the dénouement for you, but it adumbrates the climactic sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Crispin received no credit for it, of course. The Moving Toyshop is meant to be his masterpiece, even if, as one exasperated reviewer put it at the time, ‘Heaven help you if you’re expecting detection.’ My favourite, though, is Love Lies Bleeding (1948), set in a boys’ public school. Crispin maintained that his knowledge of criminal behaviour was attributable to his first postgraduate job, that of a master at Shrewsbury. It is the only work of crime fiction ever to have made me hoot with laughter. This is mainly due to Mr Merrythought, an ancient, forbidding bloodhound who effects his entrance by dribbling and trying to climb on a table. The books have wit, descriptive power, earthiness and exuberant farce of the comedy car-chase variety. Buried for Pleasure (1948) delivers a rectory-dwelling poltergeist and an escaped lunatic. In The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) a pylon is virtually a comic character. It is called the Pisser. I will leave it at that. Bonus points, as far as I am concerned, are won by the absence of soppy love scenes and hanky-panky that commonly hold up the action in crime fiction. Characters fall in love via the coup de foudre and are generally on the way to the altar within a fortnight. There are no jeremiads for the deceased, simply Fen’s dispassionate curiosity. The clues to solve the puzzle are there but you are often having too much fun to spot them. By the time he was 32, Crispin had written eight novels as well as twenty-eight musical compositions. Frequent Hearses is the antepenultimate Fen and, though equally amusing, has lost the giggly vitality of The Moving Toyshop. The Long Divorce, which followed in 1951, was the last for twenty-six years. It was The Case of the Disappearing Detective Novelist. Where did Edmund Crispin of the Gervase Fen novels go? For a time he wrote film scores; the fact that between 1958 and 1962 they included six for the Carry On series – Sergeant, Nurse, Teacher, Constable, Regardless and Cruising – simply adds to the zany charm. And after that? Writing in 1991, Douglas G. Greene, in his introduction to The Case of the Gilded Fly, quotes Crispin as explaining, ‘I lay fallow for the most part, drinking rather too heavily and writing little . . .’ In 1967 he replaced Julian Symons, president of the Detective Club, as the Sunday Times’s crime fiction reviewer, reading an average of forty books a month for five years. A price was paid for his conscientiousness. ‘To read a book a day for you – which is what it amounts to – does leave one in increasing ignorance of what is going on elsewhere in the literary world,’ he complained mildly to his editor. To learn more, I visited the Newsroom at the British Library and armed myself with microfilm of every Sunday Times for 1967. A random choice, November to December, proved lucky; here, on the review pages, was Edmund Crispin making his debut under the headline ‘Criminal Records’ (I bet he thought that one up himself). Few journalists disclosed details of their personal lives back then, so from that point of view I was none the wiser about the missing years, though reading his elliptical, brisk, compressed prose was a pleasure. I was left with the impression of a kind, decent person who wrote without malice, his reviews guided by the old adage, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’ ‘Marvellous Emma Lathen! I could do with a new book by her every week,’ began one review. Danger: Hospital Zone by Ursula Curtiss was applauded for its ‘First-rate suspense by a dab hand at the job’. Ruth Rendell’s talent was spotted early, her third Wexford novel, Wolf to the Slaughter, summed up thus:

Interesting station of Sussex police investigating disappearance of a grubby young artist’s parsimonious sister. Amusing, wellcharacterised and well-constructed, with a gratifying surprise ending and some tricksy red herrings to put you at fault from time to time.

I had a sense that Dick Francis’s Blood Sport was not quite his cup of tea but he politely commended it. I could find only one scathing review, of a book which is manifestly the antithesis of a Gervase Fen. Perhaps it’s best not to name the author or the gimcrack book in which, beneath ‘the thin wisecracks, the ohgoddery, the blood-letting and the preposterous erotic stamina lies a dispiriting vacuum’. It must have been very bad indeed. Was it the Sunday Times job that got him writing again? The final full-length Gervase Fen appeared a year before the author’s death. It is The Glimpses of the Moon (1977), and unlike the Bad Crime Novel that shall remain unnamed, it is a baffling, farcically macabre joy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Julie Welch 2019