Book description
Death and decapitation seem to go hand in hand in the Devon village of Aller.
When the first victim's head is sent floating down the river, the
village's ruralcalm is shattered. Soon the corpses are multiplying and
the entire community isinvolved in the murder hunt. While the rector,
the major, the police and a journalist, desperate for the scoop of the
century, chase false trails, it is left to Gervase Fen, Oxford don and
amateur criminologist, to uncover the sordid truth. 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.
