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1921-1978
Writer of detective novels whose real name was Robert Bruce Montgomery. He was born in Buckinghamshire and educated at Merchant Taylor's School. Declared unfit for war service he was able to pursue his studies of French and German at St. John's College, Oxford where he became friends with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (1922-1985).
On graduation in 1943 he took up a post as teacher at Shrewsbury School, where he stayed for two years, until 1945. Larkin became librarian at Wellington, 11 miles away (likewise from 1943 to 1945) and the two continued their friendship and criticism of each other's work. Montgomery gave up his teaching post at Shrewsbury and "retired" to Devon, to live a rather solitary existence immersed in his writing and music. He became a well respected reviewer of crime writing for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death in 1978. He married late in life, in 1976.
Writing as Bruce Montgomery, he was a prolific composer of vocal and film music. The Ode on the resurrection of Christ (1947) was his first composition to be published and his best work is considered to be An Oxford requiem (1951). His style was influenced by Sir William Walton, exhibiting an easy romantic style.
Despite a small number of published books to his credit, Bruce Montgomery will be remembered as Edmund Crispin, the novelist. He was inspired by the work of John Dickson Carr and Michael Innes and his hero detective, Gervase Fen, is partly based on Dr. Fell in Carr's novels. Fen is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and is described as
...a tall lanky man, about forty years of age, with a cheerful, lean ruddy clean shaven face. His dark hair, sedulously plastered down with water, stuck up in spikes at the crown. He had on an enormous raincoat and carried an extraordinary hat.
The moving toyshop (1946)
His first novel, The gilded fly, written while at university, was published in 1944. Crispin dedicated his third book, The moving toyshop (1946), to Philip Larkin "in friendship and esteem" and Larkin is reputed to have assisted with some of the passages on literary criticsm. H.R.F. Keating, who wrote the entry on the author in the Dictionary of national biography, rated this novel among the hundred best crime and mystery books ever published in his 1987 survey of the genre.
Love lies bleeding (1948), is set at a fictious English Public School, "Castrevenford".
From it, a gentle slope, planted with elms and beeches and riddled with rabbit warrens, runs down to the river bank. here the school boathouse is situated...The school gates open on the main road. A long drive runs from them, through an avenue of oaks, to the main teaching block...
Love lies bleeding (1948)
The setting is loosely based on Crispin's three year stint at Shrewsbury School and in addition to using an edge-of-country-town location, he must have derived satisfaction from portraying some of the haunts and characteristics of his acquaintances, colleagues and students from this period in his life, including portrayal of a quite separate High School for girls.
Edmund Crispin's style is fast-paced with a tongue-in-cheek humour. He takes great delight in making fun of literary conventions, frequently incorporating some quite obscure allusions and quotations that can become a little tedious. Nevertheless, here is a well written and entertaining series of detective novels, published mainly over a fairly short period of the author's life, that have endured the test of time.
The case of the gilded fly (1944) [ U.S. title
Obsequies at Oxford ]
Holy disorders (1945)
The moving toyshop (1946)
Swan song (1947) [ U.S. title Dead and dumb
]
Love lies bleeding (1948)
Buried for pleasure (1948)
Frequent hearses (1950) [ U.S. title Sudden
vengeance ]
The long divorce (1952) [ U.S. title A noose for
her ]
The glimpses of the moon (1978)
Beware of the trains (1953)
Fen country (1979)
Dons and Impossible Crimes: A classic author of the English school of Mystery writers on the Mysterylist website is a down-to-earth personal view of what works, and what does not, in Edmund Crispin's novels.
A useful summary of Edmund Crispin and his work can be found at http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/crispin.htm
There are summaries of individual novels on the Crimelit website .
Page created 1 March 2002 and last updated
6 September 2011
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