What do You think about Holy Disorders (2006)?
Like Wodehouse, Edmund Crispin's novels seem so blissfully effortless that it is only on re-reading that the craft becomes apparent. I was thrilled to find this old friend on Audible and I have thoroughly enjoyed the performance given by the narrator. In Holy Disorders, Crispin uses comedy as the velvet glove to conceal the iron fist of the plot: it is 1939 after all, and everyone is keeping an eye out for enemy agents. But given that the Devon cathedral town is chiefly known for witchburning, perhaps something more eldritch is in play? The comedy is the chief attraction, though, it reaches heights of glorious silliness that only a well-educated mind can concoct. The scene where two amateur detectives are attempting to grill a suspect but keep quoting Poe at each other is a gem, as is Fen's response when asked the name of the knot he has proposed would allow a murderer to ascend a height and then climb back down and take his rope away with him. It is, says Fen, "called the hook, line and sinker, because that's what the reader will have to swallow". This isn't a book for people who demand a patina of Seriousness in their mysteries, but for people who love playful erudition it is a major treat.
—Anna
Terrifically of its period; I absolutely love the mild eccentricity suffused into the character of Professor Gervase Fen. I spent years trying to conjecture what erudite knowledge lies between the covers of Fabre’s “Social Life in the Insect World” (pg 108); until I found that Google had digitised a copy! And I know that many visitors to Britain are greatly amused by some of our pub names; but I’ve never seen a real pub named the “Whale and Coffin” (pg.146). Is Bruce Montgomery, aka ‘Edmund Crispin’ perhaps asking his reader to think more deeply? In 1821, the whaling community was horrified to learn of a first-time whaler crewman named Owen Coffin who was murdered for the purpose of feeding three starving mates. Inspired by that story, Herman Melville wrote the novel Moby Dick. Crispin writes that the innkeeper ‘had been talking to three regulars …”Perhaps there’s a PhD. thesis in here? If so, I shall expect a credit!
—^
One of my favourite Gervase Fen novels. I must declare an interest as an organist and musician and this book describes the bizarre death of the organist of an unnamed south-western cathedral where Fen is deputising during the long vacation from his post as a professor of English at Oxford University until the appointment of a new organist. Edmund Crispin was the pen name of Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), quite well known in the mid-20th century as a composer of film music (including some for the "Carry On" films, and often to be found remaindered in second-hand bookshops with his short cantata "The Birthday of Christ.")The Fen novels are light-hearted and occasionally Fen speaks directly either to his audience or to the author, complaining perhaps that we are nearing the end of the book and he has yet to formulate the solution.For many years Crispin/Montgomery lived in Devon, in the Totnes area, so definitely counts as a Devon author. Other books in the series I would recommend include The Moving Toyshop, Love Lies Bleeding, The Long Divorce and The Glimpses of the Moon, the latter published some 20 years after the other books in the series and only a year before his death in 1978.
—John
