I highly recommend this volume. I consider this essential reading in the philosophy of mind/epistemology. The Wright essay here is actually fairly clear. But this text contains some classic material by Davidson and Burge, et. al.

Edmund Crispin is not known as a writer who features animals in his mysteries. Yet in "Swan Song," he gave us the bald, pub parrot that recited Heine in the original German.

In "Love Lies Bleeding," Mr. Merrythought, the ancient, slovenly bloodhound thwarted a double murder.

"The Long Divorce" introduces Lavender, the cat who sees Martians. (Either you have a cat who sees Martians---there is one perched on my printer right now, staring off into what humans refer to as 'empty space'---or else you will have to take Mr. Crispin's word that such perceptive cats exist.) Lavender, the marmalade-colored tomcat with unusual visual powers is instrumental in the capture of a murderer.

Murder is really secondary to the story of a village plagued by an anonymous letter-writer. Some of the letters are merely obscene. Others are poisonously factual.

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford is importuned by an old friend to expose the anonymous letter-writer. And so Fen, microscopically disguised under the name of 'Mr. Datchery' (borrowed from Charles Dickens's "The Mystery of Edmund Drood") takes himself off to his friend's bucolic village.

"To an obbligato of bird-song Mr Datchery marched beneath a bright sky towards Cotton Abbas. And he carolled lustily, to the distress of all animate nature, as he walked....The directions given him at Twelford had been explicit. But since he believed himself to possess an infallible bump of locality, he was soon tempted to modify them with a variety of short cuts, and after about three miles he discovered, much to his indignation, that he was lost."

Is that or is that not Fen to the life?

"The Long Divorce" (1952) is eighth in Crispin's series of mysteries starring his literate, cynical, sometimes bumptious amateur detective. It is also a comedy of rural, post-war England. The characters are dead-on: the army veteran who is trying to stop smoking; the female physician who is struggling to build a practice in a conservative backwater; the teenager who both loves and is ashamed of her obnoxious, money-grubbing father.

Many of the mystery writers of the 1940s and 1950s were guilty of creating one-dimensional female stereotypes, or going off on the occasional anti-feminist rant. Margery Allingham, Rex Stout, and John Dickson Carr come readily to mind as producing examples of this type of writing. Crispin also creates the occasional stereotype, especially in his early novels and some of his short stories, but the characters in "The Long Divorce" are fully and fascinatingly realized---especially the women (okay, okay---except for the innkeeper's wife and the sluttish barmaid. But they are very minor players).

Crispin also works in an ongoing and thoughtful dialogue on suicide, and there is a hair-raising scene where Fen just manages to prevent a young girl from killing herself.

"The Long Divorce" is a classical Golden-Age British mystery, a thoughtful essay on suicide, and a marvelous, occasionally hilarious study of the rural English character. I feel the same frustration that Fen felt, when at story's end he reveals his true name to a gathering of the book's characters---and very few of them have heard of him.

Why isn't Fen at least as well-known as Lord Peter or Miss Marple or Nero Wolfe? He certainly deserves to be.

Excellent example of cutting edge British New Testament scholarship

The critic Anthony Boucher once described the British writer and composer, Edmund Crispin (pseudonym for Robert Bruce Montgomery) as a "master of fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek mystery novels, a blend of John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, M.R. James, and the Marx Brothers."

"The Moving Toyshop," published in 1946, was Crispin's third Gervase Fen mystery. This particular whodunit involves an unusual will, a hunt for five eccentric characters named after the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, and of course, a moving toy shop with a corpse in its upper story. The action begins in the Autumn of 1938, when the poet, Richard Cadogan wangles an advance from his London publisher and sets out for a vacation in Oxford.

The reader begins to realize the oddity of the journey he has embarked upon with the poet, when Cadogan hitches a ride with truck driver who quotes Coleridge ("a thahsand, thahsand slimy things lived on and so did I.") but prefers D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Somebody's Lover."

We're entering Fen Country now, where even the truck drivers and police detectives are amateur literary critics, and our detective, Gervase Fen is the Oxford don of English Language and Literature. Dialogue fizzes with cynical witticisms and literary allusions when Fen and the poet, Cadogan go at it, or when Fen takes on any of a number of amateur classicists who populate "The Moving Toyshop."

All of Crispin's Fen mysteries can be read with pleasure for the dialogue alone. This particular book also has a full cast of British eccentrics, including the five Edward Lear characters (one of whom is a murderer).

Here is your first limerick-clue:

"There was an Old Person of Mold who shrank from sensations of Cold; so he purchased some muffs, some furs, and some fluffs, and wrapped himself up from the cold."

Racket through the streets (and sometimes the lawns) of Oxford in Fen's battered, red roadster, Lily Christine III! Make up limericks and shout them out to passing scholars! Join the hunt for the missing toyshop, the corpse, and the murderer! You will enjoy a sometimes farcical, always exhilarating ride.

"The Moving Toyshop" is Crispin on his own home turf (he was educated at St. John's College, Oxford), and at the top of his classical form.

Museum Basics is an amazing resource for anyone studying museology, conservation and preservation! Great perspective on european museology!

This review was meant for Crispin's "The Art of Knowing"

Edmund Crispin (pseudonym for Bruce Montgomery) wrote "Obsequies at Oxford" in 1944 while he was still an undergraduate at St. John's College, Oxford. It features the advent of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire. Another of my favorite characters, the deaf and possibly senile Professor Wilkes also appears for the first time and tells a ghost story right before the first murder occurs. A story within a story. A mystery within a mystery.

Fen solves both the mystery of the "Obsequies at Oxford," and the mystery within the ghost story.

Crispin specialized in creating 'impossible' murders for his Oxford don to investigate. A murder usually acquires the label 'impossible' at the death scene, when someone blurts out, "No one could have gotten past the gate keeper (or into the locked room or through the sky light). This is impossible!"

In "Obsequies at Oxford," we have:

"...Accident practically impossible. And murder, apparently, quite impossible. So the only conclusion is---

"The only conclusion is," put in the Inspector, "that the thing never happened at all."

Now Fen is off and running! A whole troupe of actors and actresses had motives for killing their colleague, and all of them (of course) have alibis.

The story begins when playwright Robert Warner mounts his latest experimental drama at the Oxford Repertory Theatre. His previous play bombed in London and he wants to try out "Metromania" in the provinces before opening it on the West End. His current mistress accompanies him to Oxford, and he unwisely gives his former mistress a role in his new play. Both ladies have other admirers. Their admirers have admirers. In fact, it's hard to keep track of who loves whom without a score card---or in this case, a playbill.

Although its characters sometimes sound frivolous and superficial (and very funny), "Obsequies at Oxford" also concerns itself with the gap between outward, conventional appearances and the inner turmoil that triggered a murder. All of the suspects have valid, psychological reasons for wanting the victim to die, but Fen is skeptical about crimes committed for hate or love:

"I don't believe in the 'crime passionel,' particularly when the passion appears, as in this case, to be chiefly frustration. Money, vengeance, security: there are your plausible motives, and I shall look for one of them."

If you agree with Fen, then you will be able to eliminate ninety percent of the suspects. If you're like me, you'll keep blundering off after red herrings until All is Explained at novel's end. The author doesn't cheat---you'll get all of the clues ahead of the final denouement.

"Obsequies at Oxford" is both a tightly constructed mystery and a literate, witty, British comedy of manners.

NOTE: "Obsequies at Oxford" was also published under the title, "The Case of the Gilded Fly."

The book is very entertaining and very informative of how humans would react to meeting 11 new aliens, even though we have advanced hundreds of years into the future. You have great human and non-human characters that you relate to. I would recommend this to beginning readers of science fiction.

"Sudden Vengeance (1950)" was originally published in England as "Frequent Hearses." Both titles are cribbed from "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" by Alexander Pope:

"On all the line a sudden vengeance waits, / And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates."

Expect that even the most vicious murderer in an Edmund Crispin mystery will quote Dryden or Shakespeare at the drop of a garrote. "Sudden Vengeance" is a fertile setting for this type of classical badinage, since its plot involves the making of a film based on the biography of Alexander Pope. Gervase Fen, Oxford don of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire is hired by the film company as a story consultant, and he is plagued throughout the book by a Scotland Yard detective who is an amateur classics scholar. Fen wants to discuss the murder. Chief Inspector Humbleby wants to talk about the Brontes and Dr. Johnson. Neither one will admit to a less than perfect understanding of either his profession or his hobby, and both despise amateurs. Their encounters keep "Sudden Vengeance" sparkling along right up until its final page. Here is a sample of dialogue, wherein Inspector Humbleby deliberately misunderstands Fen's explanation of the film's subject:

"Based," Fen reiterated irritably, "on the life of Pope."

"The Pope?"

"Pope."

"Now which Pope would that be, I wonder?" said Humbleby, with the air of one who tries to take an intelligent interest in what is going forward. "Pius, or Clement, or--"

Fen stared at him. "Alexander, of course."

"You mean"---Humbleby spoke with something of an effort---"you mean the Borgia?"

All of Crispin's characters are carefully (one might say 'crisply') developed, and distinguished for the reader by a quirk or eccentric manner of speech (sometimes Crispin overplays the eccentricity at the expense of realism, especially with his main protagonist-- I do wish Fen would stop expostulating, "Oh, my fur and whiskers!"). Physical description is sketchy. If one of Crispin's characters walked past you in the street, you probably wouldn't recognize him. However, if you were to overhear his conversation with the postman---

And I don't mean to imply that "Sudden Vengeance" is all dialogue and no action. There is one especially harrowing scene where a young woman chases the murderer into a maze in order to learn his identity and then (when reason returns) can't find her way back out again. By the time Fen rescues her, she has endured an experience right out of an M.R. James horror story (in fact, the young woman quotes M.R. James at length while she is traversing the maze - a typical Crispin characteristic).

The mystery surrounding the murderer's identity and motivation is as cleverly convoluted as the maze, and it is equally as hard to get to its heart. Crispin himself wrote and published at least one film script and composed music for several films, so "Sudden Vengeance" is told with the knowledge of a movie industry insider.

If you like vintage British mysteries with a 'classical education' and haven't yet discovered the 'Professor Fen' novels, then you're in for a treat-- assuming you can find these out-of-print volumes. Here are all nine of the Fen mysteries plus two collections of short stories, in case you want to keep going:

"The Case of the Gilded Fly" ("Obsequies at Oxford"), 1944;
"Holy Disorders," 1945;
"The Moving Toyshop," 1946;
"Swan Song" ("Dead and Dumb"), 1947;
"Love Lies Bleeding," 1948;
"Buried for Pleasure," 1948;
"Frequent Hearses" ("Sudden Vengeance"), 1950;
"The Long Divorce," 1952;
"Beware of the Trains," 1953 (short stories);
"The Glimpses of the Moon," 1978;
"Fen Country," 1979 (short stories).

The British mystery author, Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart wrote the introduction to "Swan Song," wherein he claims that Crispin solved the dilemma of the 'Great Detective versus the bumbling police' scenario that many Golden Age mystery authors had to contend with. The dilemma in a nutshell: why would a twentieth-century policeman, who was much more adept and scientifically trained than his counterpart in the late Victorian era of Sherlock and Mycroft, call in an amateur (no matter how intelligent) to help him with his inquiries?

According to Innes, "The Great Detective was, curiously, often a person of title, like Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, or at least the familiar of persons of title. It is never easy to render plausible the acceptance of a meddlesome private investigator by a group of professional policemen standing round a corpse, and novelists appear to have felt that a lord will be better received..."

Innes himself wrote a series of mysteries starring the titled Sir John Appleby.

Crispin avoided the 'blue-blooded detective' solution. His detective, Gervase Fen is part of the same social milieu as the police. He is a professor of English literature at Oxford, but his cherished hobby is criminal investigation. His detective counterpart (Sir Richard Freeman in "Swan Song") has a passion for literary scholarship. Their dialogues (mainly disagreements) keep "Swan Song" swimming right along. It's definitely not a 'Great Detective versus bumbling policeman' relationship---it's more like two crotchety friends with mutual interests who keep running into each other in various Oxford pubs and murder scenes.

"Swan Song" starts out rather unpromisingly:

"There are few creatures more stupid than the average singer. It would appear that the fractional adjustment of larynx, glottis and sinuses required in the production of beautiful sounds must almost invariably be accompanied---so perverse are the habits of Providence---by the witlessness of a barnyard fowl."

I would have thought that the above statement applied to tenors and sopranos only (singing in such a high register seems to destroy their brain cells), but it is the bass in "Swan Song" who sets himself up for murder. Several members of "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" cast have good reasons for wishing Edwin Shorthouse dead, in spite of his voice and its drawing power.

Even his composer-brother has a motive for killing the bass, and after a meeting with him, Fen is also made to question the intelligence of composers: "As a general rule, composers aren't the brightest of mortals, except where music's concerned."

Since Crispin himself composed music, it might be better if the reader did not take his commentary on the intelligence of musicians too seriously!

One of my favorite characters from "The Moving Toyshop" shows up in "Swan Song"-the deaf and (according to Fen) senile Professor Wilkes who makes a habit of stealing Fen's whisky. He and Fen are always good for a round or two of acrimonious repartee whenever they meet.

A third dialogue element that threads merrily through the book is a crime writer's attempt to interview Fen about his most famous cases. Every time Fen clears his throat and begins, "The era of my greatest successes..." someone is bound to interrupt him.

We never do get to learn what Fen considers his greatest successes, but surely the outcome of "Swan Song" must be counted among them.

NOTE: "Swan Song" was also published under the title "Dead and Dumb."