Edmund Crispin - The Glimpses of the Moon (1977)

[Calenture]

First published 1977 by Victor Gollancz and BCA

Gervase Fen, the donnish author with a flair for amateur detection, of earlier Crispin novels, has retreated to a quiet and very English village to work on a critical essay of modern English novelists (a task for which he seems singularly lacking in enthusiasm). This idyll is disturbed by the discovery of a dismembered and amusingly rearranged body in a nearby field.

Since the victim was well known for his sadistic treatment of small animals, little grief is spared, the main question being the location of the dead man's head, and the puzzle of the murderer's identity (which may or may not be the same as that of the rearranger of body parts - there is a suspicion that possibly someone just did that for fun). The head turns up here... and here... and there... and meanwhile Fen has found himself the unwitting accessory after the fact of yet another murder.

This is one of those books which has you less concerned with the crimes than the bizarre community they take place in. The village's residents (and suspects) include a reluctant composer of horror film music, a simian-faced rector with a flair for practical jokes, two stone deaf spinsters with only one hearing-aid between them, and a retired major yearning for the days of the horse cavalry. The police, expectedly, are less than competent, among their number a constable with a taste for Mickey Spillane thrillers, and a sergeant who drives everyone to distraction by explaining aloud every spanner turn as he works under a broken-down car (no-one dares interrupt in case he loses track and has to start over again).

Dominating the entire village is a malfunctioning electricity pylon whose sporadic fizzlings have locally earned it the name the Pisser. In one long episode watched by Fen and the Major from the top of an apple tree (I won't attempt to explain why) the local hunt is sabotaged, a tortoise goes on the rampage, a herd of cows tries to climb a car and the rector foils a burglary while Sweb helicopters buzz around. It's all a bit Tom Sharpe really, and made me feel that this was really the sort of stuff I'd been wanting to read every time I'd picked up an Agatha Christie whodunnit (but was disappointed every time).

Crispin's first novel for over twenty years, but I had the distinct feeling that he'd been working at it on and off for at least half that time. When was the last time anyone saw a psychedelic painted car? If anything, the curious anachronisms seem to add to the book's appeal. I enjoyed every page of it.

Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery, (usually credited as Bruce Montgomery) (October 2, 1921—September 15, 1978), English crime writer and composer.

[pulphack]

This is an absolutely splendid book, and the bst epitaph that EC could have written for himself. The surrounding area in the novel is a less than subtle picture of where EC lived, and the composer is a particularly harsh portrait of himself.

The early Fen novels are superb erudite crime romps, with Fen as a particualrly rakish figure - something he's lost by this one, which may be a relfection of EC once more. The Moving Toyshop and Love Lies Bleeding are bona fide brit crime classics, and The Long Divorce is noteable for the fact that Fen himself doesn't appear until halfway through, although he does lurk anonymously in the first half of the book.

I get the impression that Fen was how Bruce Montgomery saw himself in the beginning, as they have the same kind of background; but as time went by, the books were not the main earner - scoring cheapo brit comedies was his forte, and indeed Peter Rogers produced Raising The Wind, which was also written by EC/BM and is a kind of Doctor/early Carry On hybrid set in a music college.

However, EC was a bugger for the bottle, and as the years went by he became unreliable apparently (this, according to Peter Rogers, why he dropped him as Carry On musical director). I suspect, having read a little about him, his ego was also dented that he didn't become as big as Christie in the crime writer stakes. He needed big sales as he was, in his own words, naturally indolent and preferred a sedentary life down in Devon. But they never came, and so much of his later writing career was given over to book reviewing and editing (he was responsible for several crime anthologies and was also instrumental in giving sf a veneer of respectability via his Faber anthologies) where the money was instant and relatively easily earned.

Why he wrote this after so long is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps he was just fed up of the novels being semi-forgotten (there was also a collection of Fen shorts called Fen Country), or perhaps it was an attempt at a valedictory yell.

Whatever, it's a fine book. Fen novels did come back into print - some as Pan 'crime masterworks', which he would have liked. Like Christina Brand, a bit forgotten now, but a cut above the Christies and Marshs of the world in the way he handles a story. Which is not to say that I don't like either of the aforementioned: rather, i think that the straightforward nature of their storytelling made them easier for a mass audience to read easily and quickly. People like Crispin take more effort to understand, and most crime readers (readers per se) don't read for this reason.

Anyway, enough rambling - if you see one of his books, buy it - they all have a distinctly eccentric slant.