"Edmund Crispin" was the pen name used by Robert Bruce Montgomery to write a series of mysteries featuring Gervase Fen, an Oxford University professor. The first nine of the books were written between 1944 and 1951, and for more than a quarter-century after that - nothing until 1977, when Fen (and Crispin) returned in The Glimpses of the Moon, the ninth and last novel in the series.
Was it worth the wait?
I think most of Crispin's fans - myself included - would say "yes," though it's longer and more convoluted than the earlier novels. It’s a little wilder, a little coarser, a little funnier, with a little more convoluted plot and a little more in the way of horrifying scenes than the earlier books – and it is a book that will be savored by any Crispin fan who may not have come across it before. It's the subject of my audio review today on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
The Glimpses of the Moon begins eight weeks after a horrendous murder. A truly awful person named Routh was murdered, apparently by a completely insane man named Hagberd who objected to Routh’s habits, which included torturing animals. When Hagberd had found that out about Routh, he proceeded to beat the living daylights out of Routh. It was only a short time afterwards that Routh was murdered, the body dismembered and artfully rearranged (though the head was missing). Nobody seemed to mind Routh’s death very much, and Hagberd was duly arrested and put into a mental institution.
All this had happened before the opening of the book, which finds Professor Gervase Fen on a sabbatical leave from Oxford and working on a book of criticism of the post-war British novel, a topic he appears to be coming to loathe. By the end of the first chapter, it becomes quite clear that while what I called the "artful rearrangement" of Routh's body after his death might well have been committed by Hagberd, the latter could not have committed the murder, having been elsewhere and talking with other people at the time the crime must have happened.
And we’re off. I’m not going to try to follow the story line for you because the action (and the characters) are quite mad. But then, as one of Fen’s friends, says,
“everyone who lives in the countryside’s a bit touched, one way or another. If we all started trying to have each other certified there’d be nobody left.”
So you may expect thoroughly eccentric characters, more murders (and more missing heads), police officers pursuing their own theories about those murders, a certain amount of nymphomania, thankfully also offstage, stray herds of cows, a rather disastrous fox hunt, a couple of car chases, a composer of music for horror films, an English Church fair, a writing style that glories in the use of obscure phrases and words that may send you to the dictionary…well, you’re extremely unlikely to be bored. Veteran fans of Gervase Fen will undoubtedly find it delightful. It’s The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin.
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