Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978) who wrote crime fiction under the name Edmund Crispin and composed music for films under his real name is hardly a forgotten author. His literary output was small compared to some of his contemporaries, only nine novels and two volumes of short stories, most produced between 1944 and 1953 but he continued to review mysteries for the Sunday Times for years and he edited several anthologies. There are any number of sources for more detailed information about Montgomery; a good starting place is the GA Detection Wiki: http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7930277/Crispin,%20Edmund
His series detective, an eccentric Oxford don of English literature named Gervase Fen, is said to have been modeled on Crispin’s Oxford tutor W. G. Moore of St. Johns College. The plots of the novels are complicated and sometimes not especially credible. The writing though is highly literate and deeply amusing.
I read and loved all of the books years ago but I had too many other books to read to re-visit them until the fourth in the Fen series crossed my path last month and I realized it had been far too long. There’s always the risk that inevitable changes in perspective over time will render a once-loved book into a “what was I thinking?” moment but that was not the case at all. If anything, my greater reading experience let me recognize references that I likely missed the first time through.
In Swan Song (Victor Gollancz, 1947) an operatic baritone known both for his magnificent performances on stage and his revolting personal behavior off is killed in his dressing room, well after the opera house had emptied for the evening. The night watchman was in his room across the hall from the baritone and insisted that no one entered or left during the time the death had to have occurred. Chief Constable Sir Richard Freeman of the Oxford police naturally consulted his friend Gervase Fen, who was already acquainted with the tenor in the cast.
I had forgotten just how funny the books are. Crispin/Montgomery was a master of snark and I chortled and snickered all the way through. His other career in music provided considerable background to this plot and no doubt also inspired some of the characters as well as observations on musicians in general. For instance, the book starts with a pithy if unkind comment about the average intelligence of singers and never lets up.
The solution Fen offers is a feat of mechanical engineering that I am not convinced could actually be performed. However, it is typical of the unpredictable nature of the Fen plots. Readers who require well-placed clues may be disappointed with his books. The comments about Fen’s contemporaries and Montgomery’s contemporaries though are wonderful. In one scene Fen and his friends are in the Eagle and Child pub, and Fen mentions seeing C. S. Lewis. Someone else says yes, of course, it’s Tuesday, Lewis is always there on Tuesdays. Tolkien’s literary group of which Lewis was a member, The Inklings, did in fact meet mid-day on Tuesdays in the pub’s private room. And a journalist asks for an interview with Fen, telling him she will be interviewing the other famous detectives such as “H. M. and Mrs. Bradley and Albert Campion”, all of whom were Fen’s crime fiction contemporaries.
Strange plot solution aside, the Gervase Fen books are essential reading for the student, devotee, or casual reader of crime fiction. Highly recommended.