While on vacation, I had the pleasure of being able to reread the corpus of the English mystery writer Edmund Crispin. Crispin's work is basically out of print these days, but you should seek it out nonetheless.
Crispin's detective is Gervase Fen, an Oxford professor of English literature. Crispin writes "fair play" mysteries in which Fen's role is to gather information and make sense of the murders. (Crispin's earlier books make more of a distinction of their "fair play" than later books. This mirrors the history of the mystery genre, in which "fair play" was publicized in direct contrast with styles that hid information from the reader, such as in Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories. As the genre broadened and stabilized, this distinction was less significant.)
The first thing you'll notice on picking up a Crispin book is their depth of allusion and breadth of language. Like us Generation Xers, Crispins's characters speak in quotes, drawing parallels between what they're experiencing and what they know from culture. However, the pop culture of mid-century Oxbridge Englanders was eight centuries of English literary tradition--Dickens, romantic poets, and Shakespeare, instead of Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and Schoolhouse Rock. The result is simultaneously familiar in style and incomprehensible in content.
Coming out of that mid-century Oxbridge literary tradition, Crispin also has a style of phrase baroque in its complexity. He's fifty years and an ocean removed from me, so there's no surprise that many of his phrases are structured in ways I'd never use. Above that, however, is a love of vocabulary that makes my own lexical pretensions seem commonplace. Crispin uses more words that I don't know than any other writer of my acquaintance. (A quick skim: "gallimaufry", previously known to me only as the title of one of Phil Foglio's Buck Godot stories; "bolster" as a noun; "literal" as an embellishment to a newspaper article; "brawn" as a kind of dish made from pig's head; "mulct"; "charabanc"; "faux-bourdon"; "volplane"; "coppice"; Latin phrases; unusual but contextually obvious constructions like "inapprehensively" = "uncomprehendingly".)
As you get further into the books, the clever mysteries and linguistic stimulation give way to greater pleasure. Crispin's characters are charming and witty, to be sure, entertaining to read about, but more than that, the books are funny. Crispin has a brilliant instinct for the absurd, drawing his comical English stereotypical characters into delightful collision. The climax of The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) defies description; its mildest element is the perch whence Fen has chosen to observe.
Crispin's humorous touches include fourth-wall asides--Fen is occasionally aware that he's a character in a novel--and his peculiar notion of English courtship, which I can only imagine descends more from P.G. Wodehouse than any real course of affiancement.
Most of Crispin's books were written during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II; the glimpses into the period--rationing continued in England, apparently, up until 1950 or so--are interesting in themselves. Also interesting from a perspective of the period is the overt presence of sex. While Crispin's happy couples may have had courtships perfunctory enough to engender amusement, there's enough frank fornication to stand in contrast to the neo-Victorianism that would grip America soon after, or the puritanism that characterized other period genre fiction (with the exception of Los Angeles' hard-boiled dicks, who were undoubtedly an influence on Crispin in this respect).
Crispin has at least nine novels and two short story collections. The latter are particularly worth noting, since, for the most part, they boil away extraneous material leaving only purified essence of puzzle mysteries--"Encyclopedia Brown" for adult minds, a fine intellectual challenge.
This is the approximate order and date of the books (prior to the 1960s, English and American copyrights were wildly out of sync):
There's a gap in there. Crispin was a pen name for Bruce Montgomery, who evidently developed a busy career scoring films in the British movie industry. (A biographical note in one of the books adds that Montgomery also edited many science fiction anthologies, but nothing further is known to me.) Glimpses was started no later than the mid-1960s, but not published until 1977. Given Montgomery's unfortunate death in 1977 or 1978 at the relatively young age of 51 or 52, one suspects retirement from the movies caused by illness gave him the free time to finish his last book; as it's easily Crispin's funniest, this is our blessing.
The 1949-1951 books are the funniest of Crispin's first career, while the 1944-1948 books are the better mysteries.
Posted by Greg at August 12, 2003 3:21 PM