Book description
When an opera company gathers in Oxford for the first post-war
production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger its happiness is soon
soured by the discovery that the unpleasant Edwin Shorthouse will be
singing a leading role. Nearly everyone involved has reason to loathe
Shorthouse but who amongst them has the fiendish ingenuity to kill him
in his own locked dressing room?
In the course of this entertaining adventure, eccentric Oxford don
Gervase Fen has to unravel two murders, cope with the unpredictability
of the artistic temperament, and attempt to encourage the course of
true love.
Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, an English
crime writer and composer. He graduated from St John's College, Oxford,
in 1943, with a BA in modern languages, having for two years been its
organist and choirmaster. From 1943 to 1945 he taught at Shrewsbury
School and in 1944 published the first of nine Gervase Fen novels,
The Case of the Gilded Fly
. He became a well respected reviewer of crime, writing for the
Sunday Times
from 1967 until his death in 1978. He also composed the music for many
of the
Carry On
films.
