Holy Disorders was Edmund Crispin's second book, written in 1945 and published the following year, but set in wartime, and featuring German spies as well as Gervase Fen. It begins with a young composer called Geoffrey Vintner receiving a bizarre warning not to accept an invitation to travel to a small town called Tolnbridge to play the organ. An equally bizarre telegram from his old friend Fen asks him to buy a butterfly net.
When Geoffrey obediently goes to a department store to purchase the net, he is attacked, only to be rescued by a young man who works there, and whose name, he says, is Henry Fielding. He also reveals that he's a member of the aristocracy. What's more, he accompanies Geoffrey to Tolnbridge to help him find out what on earth is going on.
One organist at Tolnbridge has already bitten the dust, and before long there is another tragedy. Fen is as exuberant as ever, and irritatingly keeps saying that he knows what is happening, while refusing to reveal the truth to Geoffrey or the police. This know-all behaviour was, of course, a feature of Great Detectives - Hercule Poirot was apt to tease in similar fashion - but Fen rather overdoes it.
But that doesn't detract from the enjoyment of a complicated mystery with a startling "least likely person" solution. You don't read Crispin for the characterisation, and the main villain wasn't really believable to my mind, but there is more than adequate compensation in the witty writing. There's even a cluefinder element - footnotes to the closing pages referring the reader to the clues in earlier chapters. Great fun.
5 comments:
This was an odd book, with many elements that you don't see in whodunits from that era, but in the end I liked it. I mainly remember it as the first time I'd seen an ancient Anglo-Saxon oath in a book like this (rendered on the page as "F---"), though I recall that, I can't remember a single detail of the locked-cathedral mystery!
I agree that this book is as enjoyable as most of Crispin's work, but there is a problem which I can't explain in detail - just to say that there is something about the killer's motivation which I find it hard to believe that no-one else would have noticed.
I've been re-reading all the Crispin books over the past few years, and I have enjoyed every one of them - to different degrees of course, but I liked them all. (Even Glimpses of the Moon which gets a bad press in some places). I really liked the setting, with the incongruity of English small town cathedral close, and a war going on elsewhere.
Yes, Crispin is always good fun. And coming soon - some VERY exciting news for fans Crispin and Professor Gervase Fen ...
thanks, Tony, glad to hear it. Now that's what I call a tease!
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