Book description
How acute are your powers of perception? Do they begin to match those
of Gervase Fen, Oxford don and sleuth supreme?
These sixteen short stories are classic examples of Fen's mastery of his
art-solving the most insoluble cries where even the best brains in the
police force are frankly baffled. They also allow you to flex your own
crime-solving museles: each story contains all the clues needed to
anticipate the outcome, using logic and common sense... with a bit of
ingenuity thrown in!
Do you dare to take them on? Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of
Robert Bruce Montgomery (usually credited as Bruce Montgomery) (2
October 1921 - 15 September 1978), an English crime writer and composer.
Montgomery wrote nine detective novels and two collections of short
stories under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin (taken from a character in
Michael Innes s Hamlet, Revenge!). The stories feature Oxford don
Gervase Fen, who is a Professor of English at the university and a
fellow of St Christopher s College, a fictional institution that Crispin
locates next to St John s College. Fen is an eccentric, sometimes
absent-minded, character reportedly based on the Oxford professor W. E.
Moore. The whodunit novels have complex plots and fantastic, somewhat
unbelievable solutions, including examples of the locked room mystery.
They are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style
and contain frequent references to English literature, poetry, and
music. They are also among the few mystery novels to break the fourth
wall occasionally and speak directly to the audience.
