Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978) who wrote crime fiction under the name Edmund Crispin and composed music 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 1951 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; perhaps a good starting place is at the GA Detection Wiki: http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7930277/Crispin,%20Edmund
His series detective, an odd, perceptive 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, sometimes bordering on the fantastic. The writing though is exquisite: highly literate and above all witty. It makes sorting through the story line worth the effort.
Crispin’s last collection of short stories Fen Country (Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, 1979) was published posthumously. It contains 26 short stories, many of them with Gervase Fen but not all of them. Compact, concise, they still set a problem, sketch credible characters, and work out a resolution in a crisp, no-nonsense narrative. Some are better than others of course. The story about the writer who tries in vain to work without interruption is particularly good. It not only is the longest story in the collection, it also has the longest title: We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind if We Just Dropped in for a Minute. There’s the student in Dog in the Night-Time whose father sunk nearly his entire savings into an enormous diamond just before he visited Sydney, Australia, where he died in a bus accident. The diamond is missing when she opens her father’s safe, but she finds an unexpected sum of money instead. In The Lion’s Tooth Fen borrows a trick from Sherlock Holmes and solicits the assistance of the village urchins.
My personal favorite Merry-Go-Round is a crimeless tale of revenge, with Fen firmly on the sidelines. The DI at Scotland Yard who specializes in literary forgery managed to deeply offend a wealthy book collector and the story describes how the collector avenged himself without setting a single foot outside the law. It is utterly delightful.
Perhaps not the very first anthology a vintage mystery reader should acquire, but certainly it belongs on any Golden Age TBR list.