Mini reviews #26

The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) by Edmund Crispin. Crispin’s debut is a good place to start. A marvellous meta locked room mystery  featuring the eccentric academic sleuth Gervase Fen and revolving around the death of a promiscuous actress in an Oxford college.

The Mousetrap (1952) by Agatha Christie. There’s a reason Christie’s play is the longest-running in West End (and theatre) history: it’s bloody brilliant. I’m pretty much unique in thinking it is Christie’s best play, but I just think it’s perfect. And it features at least two LGBT characters, which is always a plus. A perfect balance of suspense, humour, familiarity, and fresh, contemporary horror, this story of a snowed-in post-war guest house visited by a murderer out for revenge remains relevant in most contexts. I must have seen at least a dozen productions (the West End cast changes each November) and it never gets old. The current incarnation is the best yet, so go and see it if you’re in London. If not, catch the UK tour or one of the regular amateur productions done in other countries. You won’t regret it.

Lord John and the Private Matter (2003) by Diana Gabaldon. Outlander, the TV series based on Diana Gabaldon’s time travel romances, is one of my guilty pleasures (and pretty much confirms me as a middle-aged woman in a dashing young buck’s body). This historical spy novel takes one of the supporting character from the Outlander universe, the gay-or-possibly-bi Lord John Grey who is a spy. I’m not generally a fan of historical fiction but found this engaging, and the research not too overwhelming or besides the point. It’s a surprisingly fun novel, too. You probably need to care about the characters to enjoy it, though.

The Widow (2016) by Fiona Barton. A stunning debut psychological thriller. Barton seamlessly inhabits a range of different voices, with the most effective being that of the journalist, Kate Waters, determined to solve an old case.

The Child (2017) by Fiona Barton. A very good second novel. Barton’s writing style is as engaging as ever. However, there is a big twist which I saw coming from the midway point, and it became increasingly difficult to believe that none of the characters could see it coming or at least think of it. It was a disappointment to have this twist be the big reveal and the end of the book.

Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin

I love Edmund Crispin (aka Bruce Montgomery) and have loved him since I read Love Lies Bleeding in my school library at a tender age. I loved that book so much that I made a deal with the librarian -- I slipped her some money for wine and she marked the book as 'lost'. It was a mystery why it was in the library at all; certainly nobody had checked it out in over twenty years. Slowly, with the internet in its infancy and golden age revivals a good few years off, I pieced together a collection of Crispin's nine crime novels (I only got the short story collections recently), and decided to ration them out over my lifetime. I haven't read a Crispin for ages, so I picked one at random, and dug in. The one I picked was Frequent Hearses (1950).

I'm sorry to say that novel showcases Crispin and his brilliant donnish detective, Gervase Fen, at their weakest. The opening is glorious: a young actress, known professionally as Gloria Scott (surely a Sherlock Holmes reference), sits in a taxi, making her way through Piccadilly. When the car reaches Waterloo bridge, she alights. She walks to the edge of the bridge, and jumps to her death. A clear suicide -- but why? The young woman had just obtained her dream role in movies.

Meanwhile, Fen has been called to a film studio to advise on a new biopic of Alexander Pope. He learns of Gloria's death and sets out to investigate. Before long, there is a murder... and then another one...

The puzzle element is more pronounced than in some other books, but it is also less well integrated than anything of Crispin's I've ever read. In fact, when the solution to the mystery is revealed, it feels very much like a Sherlock Holmes story updated to fit the mid-twentieth century. I get the impression that this is an idea that should have remained firmly in a notebook; a nice and ingenious story, not fabulously realised. It should have been developed into more of a homage to the genre's heritage.

The prose is wonderfully overblown, especially when Crispin sets a scene, and it's deliciously pithy in places. For example, I love the initial description of David Crane as 'a young, thick-set man, going prematurely bald, of a type that emanates social uncertainty like ectoplasm.' The pith has its down side, however, especially when Crispin introduces working class types and women. I have not noticed this problem to any great degree in my other reading of the same author.

While I would recommend Crispin to nearly every reader, I would not recommend starting with Frequent Hearses. It is dated in all the wrong ways, and is a snivelling shadow of the author's rapier wit at its best.

Death and Aunt Fancy by Edmund Crispin

A delightful and very brief short story that is collected in Fen Country, 'Death and Aunt Fancy' (1953) is being issued to readers for free by Peters Fraser Dunlop on behalf of Edmund Crispin's estate. To read the story, simply sign up to their newsletter.

The story was first published in Colliers Magazine in 1953, and has been reproduced a few times since, perhaps because it's conveniently short. But it's also very good.

'Death and Aunt Fancy' is only four pages long and as a mystery it's satisfying without being challenging. A 'tubular' man in his mid-fifties, George Gotobed, visits his long-estranged aunt and her companion. Within minutes, his aunt has uttered some cryptic words and George departs, confused. Not long later, there's a murder...

Gervase Fen, the eccentric Oxford don whom I fell in love with as a boy, appears in a wonderful sketch, hearing the problem and solving it on the spot. I am so pleased that something is being done with Crispin's estate, and hoping that the BBC TV project by Mark Gatiss, which was supposed to happen in 2016, materialises one day. There was something magical and frustrating, as a teenager, in trying to gather together as many Crispin books as I could, because nobody had heard of him and only The Moving Toyshop was in print.

If you're new to Crispin, or to Fen, 'Death and Aunt Fancy' is a good -- free -- place to start. If you're an aficionado, or just a fan, I'd love to chat. My favourite Fen mystery is Love Lies Bleeding. What's yours?