Caroline: We begin in a pub. A pub in Oxford. The year is 1943. A young student, just 22 years old, is having a drink with a theatrical acquaintance, reminiscing over some performances they had collaborated on the previous year. As was often the case with their friendship, the talk turned to books — what they had been reading, what they thought of it, what they might read next.
The theatrical acquaintance, whose name was John Maxwell, was astonished and a little bit amused when he started waxing lyrical about his love for the detective fiction of John Dickson Carr and his friend had no idea what he was talking about. So passionate was he about correcting this deficiency immediately that when the pub closed, Maxwell made his friend come to his rooms and pick up a copy of a Carr novel to take home with him.
His friend did not sleep that night. The Crooked Hinge, Carr’s 1938 novel in which sleuth Dr Gideon Fell untangles a mystery that involves impossible murders, the Titanic, and witchcraft, held him completely captivated. Previously a self-confessed intellectual snob with an overriding passion for composing classical music, this book opened the floodgates of golden age detective fiction for him. Writers like Gladys Mitchell, Michael Innes and Dorothy L. Sayers quickly joined Carr as his favourite authors.
A few months later, he wrote his own whodunnit in just ten days. Six weeks later, he had a publisher. Four years later, John Dickson Carr was proposing him for membership of the Detection Club. His idols became his contemporaries, even his friends.
That evening at the pub and the night he spent with The Crooked Hinge was to completely alter the course of that young man’s life. His name? Robert Bruce Montgomery. Although you probably know him better as Edmund Crispin.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.
We have arrived at the final Pledge Drive update for 2024 — you won’t be hearing me talk about this again for another year. We’ve already far exceeded the goal of adding 100 new members to the Shedunnit Book Club, the podcast’s paying membership scheme that supports everything I do here. At the time I’m recording this, we’re almost at 150, actually. If you have helped this happen, either by joining yourself, or encouraging others to do so, I want to say one last thank you for your efforts. It is no exaggeration to say that this podcast would not exist without all of you who help in this way.
As a mark of my gratitude that we met the goal so fast, I’m leaving all the perks available until the end of November, so if you’ve been meaning to grab the audiobook of Victorian detective stories read by me or the offer to gift a year’s membership to Shedunnit to a friend for free, you’ve still got a few days after this episode comes out to get your hands on them. So, if any of that sounds good to you, join now at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive.
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Robert Bruce Montgomery was born in 1921, the fourth child and only son of Robert, a civil servant, and Marion, a full-time wife and mother who named her son after one of Scotland’s great kings because she believed herself to have aristocratic forebears north of the border. Bruce, as he was generally called, grew up in middle-class comfort in Buckinghamshire, attending private school as a day pupil, free to indulge his early talent for music as much as he wished. The only difficult aspect of his childhood was his health: he had been born with problems in his lower legs and feet, and this necessitated callipers and casts for much of his early life. He could not take part in sports or physical education at school, but rather spent his extra time immersed in books and music. Regular trips to London for operations and hospital stays were a feature of his life until he was about 14.
Reading others’ recollections of Montgomery as a child in David Whittle’s excellent biography, it is clear that it was always felt in the family that there was something out of the ordinary about him, intellectually. The only and youngest boy in a family of girls, he was openly called “the afterthought” by his parents and I’m sure treated differently to his sisters. Family lore held that a terrifying accident when he was four years old had gifted him heightened mental powers. A horse had kicked him in the head and it was apparently unclear for a while if he would live, but once he recovered his academic prowess was regularly attributed to this event. This idea that a blow to the head can confer extra cleverness or creativity has no established scientific basis, by the way, but it recurs quite a bit in the life stories of talented people. Sometimes called “acquired savant syndrome”, Augustus John and Wilfred Owen are just two of the figures who had an event like this in their biographies.
Montgomery was already playing piano and beginning to compose his own music when he had a fortunate meeting while on a family holiday with a professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Geoffrey Sampson was twenty years his senior and happily became young Bruce’s musical mentor, encouraging him to pursue composition and take his music seriously. An orthopaedic surgeon recommended that learning the organ could be a beneficial form of exercise for the boy’s much-operated-on legs too, and these two events together set Bruce Montgomery on the path to what all concerned hoped would be a stellar musical career as a composer and a conductor. The ongoing problems with his legs ruled Montgomery out of any active service once war broke out in 1939, and after finishing school he worked for a while in a local food distribution office before taking up a place to read modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford in 1940. Because the university intake was much depleted by the war, he was also pressed into musical service there and served as organist and choirmaster at the college for two of the three years he was in attendance.
What does all of this have to do with detective fiction? Very little. It merely serves to show how set Bruce Montgomery was on his path to becoming a full-time musician, and how literally overnight his future was altered by the simple act of reading a John Dickson Carr novel.
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We are fortunate that several of Montgomery’s contemporaries at Oxford were to go on to become major literary celebrities, meaning that their recollections of their student years have been carefully recorded and preserved. Thus, Alan Ross, poet and critic, wrote in his autobiography that “there was no doubt who, of us all, appeared the most sophisticated, best-read, widely connected and gifted. Bruce Montgomery may have been slightly older than us, but he was light years ahead in experience.” Kingsley Amis, a lifelong friend from Montgomery’s student days, remembered seeing him first from a distance and being impressed by his wavy auburn hair, his louche dressing gown, and his “indefinable and daunting air of maturity”. Philip Larkin, another contemporary and friend, initially thought that Montgomery wasn’t an undergraduate, because his palpable air of purpose and his walking stick made him seem so much older and more assured.
I’m sure we have all known somebody like that, whose powerful self-belief feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Montgomery had come to Oxford fizzing with the feeling that he was going to be somebody, and his fellow students naturally responded it. He certainly had a knack for collecting friends and acquaintances that could be useful to him: as well as Ross, Amis and Larkin, his social circle included Charles Williams, a member of the Inklings, Muriel Pavlow, an up and coming film actress, and Diana Gollancz, daughter of the publisher Victor Gollancz.
The detective novel that Montgomery wrote over ten days during his Easter holiday in 1943 was duly sent to Diana’s father, who was already well known as the publisher of crime writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and Francis Iles, among others. Victor Gollancz’s verdict is recorded in the publisher’s report on the book: “The plot is adequate, though not particularly brilliant. Its somewhat pedestrian character is, I think, offset by the general ‘cleverness’ of the thing as a whole.” Within a month, a contract was being signed.
No doubt, Montgomery benefited from being a close friend of a major publisher’s daughter, and from the general popularity of the genre in which he was writing. By 1943, the classic detective story was so beloved by readers that every business-minded publisher was still signing up new authors wherever possible. Still, these factors alone would never have convinced Gollancz to take Montgomery on. This first book, The Case of the Gilded Fly, contains many elements that were to recur across his nine novels with minimal additional development, and so is worth a closer look.
Chief among them is the detective, Gervase Fen, who would go on to appear in all of the novels and many of Montgomery’s short stories. Fen is a Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, based in a lightly fictionalised version of Montgomery’s own college. He’s middle-aged, married, energetic and prone to sudden deep enthusiasms, which are taken up and abandoned with equal gusto. In Love Lies Bleeding from 1948 we get a clear physical description of him: “He was a tall, lanky man, a little over forty years of age. His face was cheerful, ruddy and clean-shaven, with shrewd and humorous ice-blue eyes, and he had on a grey suit, a green tie embellished with mermaids, and an extraordinary hat.” This “extraordinary hat” of Fen’s is something of a running joke — three decades later, in The Glimpses of the Moon, we are told that Fen still possess this flamboyant accessory.
Fen is not charming or personable, as Nigel Blake, a former student of Fen’s who acts as his assistant in The Case of the Gilded Fly, wryly observes early on in the book: “On his arrival Fen had been extremely rude to him — but then he was habitually rude to everyone; it was a natural consequence, Nigel decided, of his monstrous and excessive vitality.” As a detective, Fen is not usually inclined to share his workings with fellow characters or readers, preferring the classic last chapter reveal in a way that should raise eyebrows among fans of fair play. His is an investigative style based on observation and interview, with little resort to forensic or scientific methods. He is addicted to literary quotation, frequently strewing his speech with allusions to Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and everything in between. And he loves to make a bold declaration about himself or detection in general: at one point in Montgomery’s first novel, his detective declares that “I’m the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction!” An avowed amateur, he nonetheless throughout the books maintains useful friendships with figures like the Chief Constable of Oxford and a Scotland Yard Detective Inspector.
The Case of the Gilded Fly takes place in Oxford, with much rushing around the city’s streets. Montgomery would use this as his primary location twice more, in The Moving Toyshop from 1946 and Swan Song from 1947. In the other books, Fen is either on holiday somewhere, as in the case of 1945’s Holy Disorders, or visiting a location in a professional capacity, such as in Frequent Hearses from 1950 when he is acting as an academic consultant at a London film studio. Buried for Pleasure is an intriguing departure from the literary-academic milieu, because it sees Fen standing for election as an MP in a rural constituency, seemingly for no better reason than he fancied a bit of a change from the Oxford life.
Montgomery’s first detective novel also features a John Dickson Carr style impossible crime — an element that he would return to in almost every novel that he wrote. In this one, a police inspector about a third of the way into the book tries to assess the explanation for a woman shot dead not by her own hand in a room that nobody else can have entered or existed thus: “The only conclusion is that the thing never happened at all”. Additionally, we have a strong theatrical connection, with the action set among the cast of a new play being premiered in Oxford, and references to music via a character who is the organist at Fen’s college. Other novels, especially Swan Song, return to Montgomery’s interest in theatre and opera.
This makes up almost the complete suite of major Edmund Crispin tropes. There are just three others that come into focus after The Case of the Gilded Fly. The first is the peculiar matter of animal cruelty. Montgomery was an animal lover in his personal life, being particularly fond of cats, yet almost all of his novels feature some kind of animal-based plot point that often tends towards violence. Two of his books feature dogs being shot quite abruptly and tragically, in another an important pig character is killed when a building collapses, and The Glimpses of the Moon contains a character who tortures of all sorts of animals for fun.
I have never been able to find an adequate explanation for this recurring theme, especially since it makes quite the contrast with the avoidance of direct violence more common in the golden age detective fiction by which Montgomery was so inspired. This is perhaps related to his use of guns, which appear far more often in his fiction than elsewhere. Usually they are wielded in an inexpert and British fashion to coerce cooperation, as in Holy Disorders, but there are some shootouts that feel distinctly unclassic at times. And the last motif I want to touch on is cars: Fen is passionate about his bright red sports car, the Lily Christine, and several of the novels in which he appears feature prolonged car chases that, again, don’t feel especially golden age. The one in Frequent Hearses is my favourite, being quite cinematic and dramatic, but not very in keeping with the broader genre. I invite you to imagine Hercule Poirot at the wheel of a sports car, racing across the countryside in chaotic pursuit of malefactors. It doesn’t work, does it?
After the break: Who was Edmund Crispin?
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The very name that Bruce Montgomery chose for his crime writing endeavours is an inside joke aimed at lovers of detective fiction. In Hamlet, Revenge!, a 1937 novel by Michael Innes, there is a character named “Gervase Crispin”, which handily furnished Montgomery with half of his pseudonym and half of his detective’s name. Originally he was going to write as “Rufus Crispin”, Rufus being a reference to that auburn hair that had so struck Kingsley Amis upon first seeing Montgomery, but he eventually went with the more common “Edmund”, probably drawn from the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. Montgomery was passionate about 16th and 17th century poetry, and had also been in a house named for Edmund Spenser when he was at school. The “Fen” of Gervase Fen, incidentally, came from the real-life professor upon whom Montgomery based his detective. W.G. Moore was Montgomery’s own tutor at Oxford, and the pun-loving writer had given him the nickname of “O’er moor and fen”, after the line in the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light”. Naturally, the detective’s surname must be Fen, in honour of his model. It was an affectional caricature, mostly based on Moore’s physical appearance rather than his character, and later Montgomery admitted that Fen contained quite a bit of his own personality too.
I think you can tell just from that little deviation that Bruce Montgomery loved to play with language. Puns, rhymes and sly allusions abound across all of his writing, not just his detective fiction. He adored limericks and was a fan of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Beyond just his pen name and the name of his detective, he liked to insert jokes into his books that only a select audience of readers would notice and understand. For instance, he liked to weave the names of his friends and loved ones, and their creations, into his books. Michael Innes gets another nod in Holy Disorders, when Fen bemoans the possible arrival of a highly efficient Scotland Yard detective named Appleby, the same name as Innes’s own sleuth. G.D.H. Cole, an Oxford professor and a fellow member of the Detection Club, gets a mention in Buried for Pleasure. In the play that is being rehearsed in The Case of the Gilded Fly, one of the performers is named Diana – a nod surely to Diana Gollancz, who had helped to get the book published. The Moving Toyshop is dedicated to Philip Larkin, “in friendship and esteem”, and later on when Fen is groaning over an undergraduate essay he has to read, he says it must be by “Larkin: the most indefatigable searcher-out of pointless correspondences the world has ever known”. This novel also contains a cheeky nod to Montgomery’s publisher: at one point when a character is being pursued by criminals, he decides at random to turn left, justifying this decision to himself with a muttered, “after all, Gollancz is publishing this book” — Victor Gollancz being a well-known left-wing intellectual and famed for championing authors who shared his politics.
This is one of many, many occasions where the characters in an Edmund Crispin novel make it quite clear that they know they are literary creations rather than real people. In fact, at the solution-revealing moment at the end of Holy Disorders, Fen roundly chastises the criminals for over-dramatisation and tells them to “talk English and try to stop imagining you’re in a book”. This casual and constant breaking of the fourth wall is not at all common in detective fiction of this period, and so stands out all the more. As I have been reading all of his novels in order so that I could make this episode, I’ve come to think of this self-consciousness as Montgomery’s defining characteristic as a novelist. Certainly no other writer of detective fiction that I’ve ever read has filled his books with so many of these pointed little moments.
Montgomery always plays these moments for humour; they add to the generally light-hearted tone of his books. Not only does Fen know that he is in a detective novel and offer his opinions on how such a book should and should not be structured, he even seems aware of and to be in dialogue with his creator. At the end of Holy Disorders, Fen is reflecting on his dissatisfaction with the case and observes that “I hope this affair won’t go into the Chronicles of Crispin”. Crispin himself responds pithily in a footnote, “Vain hope”. Sometimes these footnotes and his unwillingness to take detective fiction too seriously works very well. In The Case of the Gilded Fly, rather than treating the reader to yet another witness account covering the same events, a footnote tells us that Fen received from the conversation “a shortened version of that given in Chapters 2-4”.
In Love Lies Bleeding, a mystery set in a boys’ boarding school that draws on Montgomery’s own period teaching at Shrewsbury School, Fen is even writing his own — very bad-sounding — mystery. Later, in Buried for Pleasure, Fen offers some commentary on how everything is just so much more probable in detective fiction, with clues popping up just at the right moment for the narrative, whereas in real life nothing is ever that convenient. Of course, he is interrupted in his monologue by a police constable who has just found an unlikely but very helpful clue, further emphasising the transparent artifice of Montgomery’s style. The same book contains a character called Judd, who writes detective fiction under the name “Annette de la Tour” and is just dying to share all of his thoughts with Fen about how a fictional detective should conduct himself. If you think about all of these circular references for too long, your head starts to spin: if these characters know they are in a book, and sometimes even talk to their author, where does that leave the reader? I recommend just letting it all wash over you and occasionally chuckling, rather than getting too invested in the semiotics of it all.
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Montgomery was a fan of detective fiction who became a writer of it. As you’ve just heard, he loved to reference, comment on, and play with the existing tropes and habits of the genre. But he wasn’t an innovator. He didn’t move the form on; he bounced off what had already been done. This goes a long way to explain his somewhat brief and unusual bibliography. Beginning with The Case of the Gilded Fly in 1944, he published a book a year for eight years, taking him up to The Long Divorce in 1951. Then there was a 26-year gap until 1977, when his final Gervase Fen novel, The Glimpses of the Moon, was published. What on earth was he up to?
Partly, his writing career took on this shape because was busy with other things. He wrote detective fiction very intensely through the 1940s, when demand was still high for golden age style stories, and then turned most of his attention to his work as a film composer in the 1950s as that enterprise took off — he scored a number of the Carry On films and the well-known comedy Doctor in the House, among other things. He also became quite well-known for his editing of the Faber “Best Science Fiction” anthologies during this time, which helped to bring the genre to wider critical attention in Britain. He was still writing mystery short stories, mostly quite short ones on commission for the London Evening Standard, but despite repeated chasing from Gollancz, he could not get to the end of another novel. Several were started and abandoned. A short story he published in 1969 titled “We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind If We Just Dropped In For A Minute”, about a writer who can never get any peace and quiet in which to write, might be somewhat indicative of his relationship with his work at this time.
Meanwhile, his health and his personal life were suffering. Bruce Montgomery had been a heavy drinker from his Oxford days, often joined in this pursuit by his friend Philip Larkin, but in the 1950s the habit became a serious addiction. His childhood struggles with his legs also returned in the form of osteoporosis, meaning that if he fell while he was drunk he was liable to injure himself badly. He began to miss deadlines for film scores and was eventually dropped completely by the studio for which he worked — some of the difficulties he faced in this industry are bitterly satirised in Frequent Hearses and The Glimpses of the Moon. He tried to get a new, better publishing contract for more fiction, and there was some interest — Edmund Crispin was still a name people remembered. But moving on meant he first had to discharge his obligations to Gollancz, and that meant finishing this final Fen novel. Eventually, after he married his long-time secretary Ann Clements in 1976, he managed to put the finishing touches to the book and send it in for publication. He was too unwell to embark on anything new, though, and died barely two years later as a consequence of a surgery for his liver troubles.
The Times obituary for Bruce Montgomery, published on 18th September 1978, ends with a sentiment that has lingered with me ever since I first encountered it. It says: “He could easily have become Britain’s most successful postwar writer of detective stories. He could have made a busy and lucrative career composing film music. His music was agreeable, his books were elegant, literate and funny. He might have done a great deal more, but what he did produce gave much pleasure to many people.” All of those coulds. He could have done more, but he did not. This incongruity bothered those who observed him for at least the last two decades of Montgomery’s life, if not for longer. And it certainly bothered him too.
He was both a dilettante and an amateur, in the best senses of both of those terms. He flung himself into composing and crime writing with no training or experience in either, and let these activities run as long as they were interesting and lucrative for him. I think he always thought that writing classical music for concert performance would be his quote real life’s work, yet he never quite got around to doing it, despite his youthful promise as a composer. He acknowledged how envious he was of his friends Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis as they both garnered high reputations as literary figures, yet did nothing to try and match them.
The raw talent on display in the books and the music that he did publish was substantial, and yet he seemed to have no aptitude for consistency or regularity. You have heard how hard it was for him to finish his final detective novel, The Glimpses of the Moon. It is quite plausible to me that the expectation that he should be able to churn out a novel a year, at least, over many decades, as Christie or Carr or Marsh or Mitchell or Innes had done, was a factor in his struggles alongside his health problems and alcohol addiction. Those writers had set the template for what a career as a successful detective novelist looked like, and Montgomery for myriad reasons could not fit himself into it.
It is apt, I think, that the last word here should go to Agatha Christie, that most prolific and consistent of writers. She and Montgomery were friends of many decades’ standing, having first met in the 1940s when he was inaugurated as a member of the Detection Club. They both lived in Devon, too, and would thus see each other socially more often than other members who were not based in south west England. Arriving one day in his car to have lunch with her at Greenway, he encountered the woman herself on the long walk back from seeing some previous visitors off at the bus stop. He stopped to give her a lift, and as they drove up to the house she just asked him straight out why he hadn’t written anything in such a long time.
We don’t know the exact date of this encounter, but it was likely in the mid 1960s, at which point it had been about fifteen years since the publication of Montgomery’s last book. He admitted in response to Christie’s question that he just couldn’t think of a plot for a new book. Montgomery recalled later that Agatha turned to him with a twinkle in her eye and said “Oh, I shouldn’t have thought that would have worried you“.
The great lady of twentieth century crime fiction got it, even if many other critics, readers and obituary writers didn’t. Plot didn’t matter for him. Edmund Crispin had never produced great original plots or flawless twists, nor was he ever destined to publish on the kind of regular schedule that Christie herself excelled at. And yet that shouldn’t have mattered: the verve and flair and the comic absurdities and the literary references and the musical allusions and the inside jokes were always what made his books sing.
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This episode of Shedunnit was written and narrated hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. If you’d like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.
The goal for the Shedunnit Pledge Drive this year has already been met, but I’m keeping the perks, including the offer to gift a year’s membership to Shedunnit to a friend for free, open until the end of November as a thank you to all those who have shared and joined so far. Join now before the end of the month at shedunnitshow.com/pledgedrive to take part yourself.
All the books we mentioned in this episode are listed at shedunnitshow.com/edmundcrispinsinsidejokes. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.
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