Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), a music composer, is the subject of a now fifteen-year-old biography by David Whittle, Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School. As Edmund Crispin, Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978) wrote eight sparklingly witty and amusing detective novels between 1944 and 1951. He also co-wrote the classic short story “Who Killed Baker?” with fellow composer Geoffrey Bush (2007). This biography should be read by any fan of Crispin’s mystery novels (and Montgomery’s music), but inexpensive copies are hard to come by; Ashgate, the publisher, advertises it at $155. It took me years to locate a copy that I could afford ($35).
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The money invested on David Whittle’s book was well spent because he provides insightful writing about both Montgomery’s musical career and, more importantly for readers of mystery fiction, the detective novels he published under the alias Crispin. By the time he was thirty-two years old, this author had written eight books and twenty-one musical pieces. Whittle charts both his spectacular ascent and his protracted, depressing collapse. By the time Montgomery was forty, his career as a writer and composer had largely come to an end as he had fallen into alcoholism and what Whittle called “an increasingly distant semi-recluse” lifestyle. Montgomery undoubtedly left us with the charming Edmund Crispin detective stories, which are still in print today, but after reading them, one is left wanting more and wondering why Montgomery’s creative well ran dry so abruptly. Only one more mystery was written by Montgomery after his first eight detective books, The Glimpses of the Moon (1977), and he passed away at age 56. Let’s examine Edmund Crispin’s life and passing.
With one notable exception, Bruce Montgomery, the son of a civil servant who advanced to the position of Principal Clerk in the India Office, had a typical, happy childhood. Despite his Oxford education and preference for gloriously affected Noel Coward/Dorian Gray-like picture poses, Bruce Montgomery never shed the conservative, bourgeois mindset produced by his upbringing (see photo). His “congenital malformation of the feet,” from which he suffered (he was born with his feet bent inward), which required many surgeries up to the age of fourteen and during which time he had to wear calipers up to his shins, was the only source of sorrow in his boyhood. Although Montgomery was attracted to the fair sex and frequently enjoyed their company, Whittle clearly believes that the painful awareness of his physical flaw prevented him from having typical physical relationships with women (“he could not be bothered to do what they required,” as Whittle tactfully puts it). A few years before his death in 1978, when his health was quickly deteriorating and nobody expected him to “prove his masculinity,” as it were, Montgomery wed for the last time.
Whittle explains that Montgomery was inspired to write his own mystery story, The Case of the Gilded Fly, which was published in the United Kingdom by Victor Gollancz in February 1944, when the author was only twenty-two, after reading locked room mystery master John Dickson Carr’s brilliant, spooky Gideon Fell detective novel The Crooked Hinge. Montgomery was still an Oxford student at the time. The next year, Lippincott released the book in the United States with the rather more posh title Obsequies at Oxford. Montgomery hired Gervase Fen, the person who would serve as his serial investigator, as a professor of English language and literature at Oxford after being influenced by the donnish detective author Michael Innes (as well as his surroundings).
Gervase Fen rapidly rose to prominence as one of the best gentlemen amateur investigators in English detective fiction, mingling seamlessly with characters like Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. Unlike these two Crime Queens (and Ngaio Marsh, whose detective Roderick Alleyn is of the same breed despite being a policeman), Montgomery did not make Fen’s love life the center of attention instead relegating it to supporting characters, who, as Whittle points out, tend to fall in love rather ingeniously and decide to get married almost on sight. Not really a romantic leading man material, Fen. His most noticeable physical characteristic is his “black hair, ineffectively plastered down with water,” that is “stuck out in spikes from the back of his head,” and he can be conceited, faddish, and dangerously rude (Holy Disorders).
Edmund Crispin mystery stories are distinguished by intellect, humor, wit, narrative vigor, and—more frequently, in my opinion, than Whittle recognizes—clever fair play planning, not by the presence of a love interest. Edmund Crispin—use let’s this name to talk about Montgomery in his authorial persona—has some of Michael Innes’ impressive literary intellect, but his humor is more down to earth, less pricey, and less difficult to enjoy. In contrast, Crispin is a precocious, puckish schoolboy, while Innes will always be the indulgent don. Despite having a modest body of work, Crispin is one of the best comic authors of British detective fiction in my opinion.
Due to Crispin’s love of outrageous comedy, the comical segments can overpower the mystery storyline. The two books that came after The Case of the Gilded Fly, Holy Disorders (1945) and The Moving Toyshop, show this the most clearly (1946). A reader for Crispin’s British publisher Gollancz presciently observed that the latter work, which is now frequently hailed as Crispin’s masterpiece (by Julian Symons and P. D. James, for example), had “a shallow plot…but nobody cares.” Toyshop, in the eyes of the reader, came to fame on the back of its comic “verve.” Although certain literary purists, like Jacques Barzun (and, incidentally, myself), have throughout the years sounded sour notes in the heavenly chorus, it appears that the majority of contemporary readers would agree. Heaven help you if you’re expecting detection, a quavering modern critic said.
This trait of Edmund Crispin’s detective fiction is also well demonstrated in Holy Disorders (as is the outstanding cover art created by the book’s publisher, Felony & Mayhem). The first third of the story takes place without Gervase Fen showing up at all, with the early action consisting largely of a series of hilarious set pieces as Geoffrey Vintner, Fen’s Watson of the moment, tries to get to the cathedral town of Tolnbridge, where wrongdoing is rampant. He nearly immediately finds himself in a comical brawl in a department store’s sports section, where it appears like evil powers are attempting to stop him. (He is actually there because Vintner’s buddy, Fen, who has requested help from Vintner, has curiously asked his friend to fetch him a butterfly net.)
Following that, Vintner boards a train—train journeys are always presented in Crispin’s books in a delightful way—where he encounters a variety of colorful characters, including a psychiatrist who is experiencing a crisis of faith in psychiatry (Crispin’s ironic play on the traditional situation of the clergyman losing faith in God) and a vocal member of the newly energized working classes who demands the right to travel in a first-class carriage. This man says indignantly, sounding a little like American movie actor Edward G. Robinson dressed as a mobster, “You and your kind will have to show some respect for me, see, which is what we’re fighting for, see, instead of treating me like a heap of dirt, see.” (One wonders what the Crispin’s noted leftist publisher Victor Gollancz made of him.)
The mystery plot of the book does eventually begin to take shape, and it is an interesting enough one. However, the moment when Fen and Vintner visit one prominent suspect in his home and discover, to their amusement, that Poe’s poem “The Raven” seems to be materializing before their very eyes is probably the book’s high point. Holy Disorders was described as “social comedy with a concentration on murder” by one critic, which sounds like a reasonable description. As we shall see, Disorders and Toyshop are less comically harum-scarum than the mysteries from Crispin’s middle period, Swan Song (1947), Love Lies Bleeding (1948), and Buried for Pleasure (1948), and as a result, they are generally more rewarding as detective stories.
Bruce Montgomery was definitely in the height of his creative powers in the late 1940s, while he was still in his twenties. He was asked to join England’s Detection Club in 1947, the year his fourth mystery book was published. The club is a social gathering place for some of the best detective fiction authors in the nation, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and John Dickson Carr. It was only fitting that Montgomery’s hero John Dickson Carr put out his membership request.
The following three novels by Edmund Crispin—Swan Song, which is about the operatic world, and Love Lies Bleeding and Buried for Pleasure, which are about deaths at a public school and a rural village, respectively—are all excellent works that, as David Whittle notes, reflect the author’s increasing seriousness in some ways while still maintaining the trademark Crispin humor. My favorite of the three stories is Buried for Pleasure, one of the most famous detective novels written by a British author, which critiques post-World War II austerity-era England and the Labour Party’s determination to bring about what it sees as long overdue social and political change in the nation.
(Other titles that spring to mind include Henry Wade’s Diplomat’s Folly from 1951, Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced from 1950, and Miles Burton’s Death Takes the Living from 1949.) Although Montgomery, a lifelong Tory with a “very conservative inclination,” as described by Whittle, was not particularly fond of the Labour party, readers who may not share his political views may nevertheless appreciate Pleasure because of his appealing humor.
Buried for Pleasure is about English politics, as the book’s front cover for the Felony & Mayhem version indicates. Gervase Fen appears to have somewhat irrationally decided to run for a seat in Parliament from a rural area. Attractive young woman called Diana, Fen’s driver, greets him skeptically when he exits the railway station servicing Sanford Angelorum:
“Look here,” she said, “you’re a professor at Oxford, aren’t you?”
“Of English.”
“Well, what on earth…I mean, why are you standing for Parliament? What put that idea into your head?
Even to himself Fen’s actions were sometimes unaccountable, and he could think of no very convincing reply.
“It is my wish,” he said sanctimoniously, “to serve the community.”
The girl eyed him dubiously.
“Or at least,” he amended, “that is one of my motives. Besides, I felt I was getting far too restricted in my interests. Have you ever produced a definitive edition of Langland?”
“Of course not,” she said crossly.
“I have. I just finished producing one. It has queer psychological effects. You begin to wonder if you’re mad. And the only remedy for that is a complete change of occupation.”
“What it amounts to is you haven’t any serious interest in politics at all,” the girl said with unexpected severity.
When Gervase Fen makes his way into the village and his lodging at The Fish Inn, he meets an amazingly rich gallery of characters: a traditionalist detective novelist likely modeled on his fellow Detection Club members John Rhode (Cecil John Charles Street) and Freeman Wills Crofts (“Characterization seems to me a very over-rated element in fiction,” he pronounces); the comely and amiable manageress of The Fish Inn; the owner of The Fish Inn, determined to evade exacting labor regulations by expanding his inn himself, with the help of friends and family—with dubious results; a Socialist lord; the lord’s skeptical, phlegmatic butler (who understands Thorstein Veblen much better than his master); Fen’s unflappably cynical “old boy” campaign manager; a cleric living in a house haunted by a not altogether frightening poltergeist; an escaped lunatic (at times he thinks he’s Woodrow Wilson and is apt to lecture about his Fourteen Points); a chorus of rustics; and, last but certainly not least as things turn out, a “non-doing” pig. Always watch out for animals in Crispin, as Whittle points out in his book.
The comedic froth in Buried for Pleasure is literally overflowing. Even with its killings, I dare say it is one of the best novels in English country humor. Whittle points out that the book Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons is mentioned, and not without reason. However, the author skillfully and persuasively handles the fair play murder narrative line, which is interesting in and of itself. Furthermore, the political humor is excellent.
Whatever one’s opinions of the politics of the time, Fen’s anti-Labour parable about the use of the politics of envy during the Cold War—it seems there were three foxes—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—who, envious of each other’s special possessions, ended up squabbling until, distracted, they fell “easy prey to a number of cannibal foxes which descended on them from the East and to I was unhappy that this parable—the pinnacle of the political plot—received so little consideration from David Whittle despite the fact that his overall analysis of the Crispin detective novels is pretty strong.
Buried for Pleasure achieves the comic heights of Holy Disorders and The Moving Toyshop, yet it also offers a more controlled mystery plot—a winning combination, in my view. The last two Edmund Crispin novels from the 1944-51 period, Frequent Hearses (published as Sudden Vengeance in the United States) and The Long Divorce, show signs of further artistic development in a serious direction. In particular, The Long Divorce offers the best of Crispin mystery plots along with an interesting, seriously presented female protagonist.
In 1950, between the days of Friday, June 2 and Monday, June 5, The Long Divorce takes place. (At these specific times, Gervase Fen is traveling to and from a railway station, which is only fitting in a Crispin book.) Fen is approaching the village of Cotten Abbas under the guise of “Mr. Datchery”—bonus points if you recognize this literary allusion—to examine a string of poison pen letters that have been afflicting the populace at the request of the local police. This straightforward setup should be more than enough to captivate a fan of traditional English mystery. I was definitely hooked.
