Customer Reviews

Fen Country

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"Fen Country" (1979) is a posthumous collection of short mysteries, with only one story repeated from Crispin's earlier collection, "Beware of the Trains" (1953). If you are new to this author, I suggest you start with one of his full-length mysteries to get the full flavor of his sometimes cranky, always brilliant amateur detective, Gervase Fen.

The best of the "Fen Country" stories feature Professor Fen with Chief Inspector Humbleby of New Scotland Yard as his Watson. Some of the mysteries feature different, anonymous detectives and these stories tend to be clever puzzles with only the barest accouterments of character development or setting.

There is one semi-autobiographical, wish-fulfillment story, "We Know You're Busy Writing, but We Thought You Wouldn't Mind if We Just Dropped in for a Minute."

"I am forty-seven, unmarried, living alone, a minor crime-fiction writer earning, on average, rather less than 1,000 [pounds] a year."

The crime writer lives alone in Devon, and has begged his friends and creditors not to interrupt him during working hours. Naturally they do, including a man and woman on the lam from their respective spouses. There is no great mystery as to the fate of the lovers, only a great deal of authorly glee.

"Fen Country" is a good read for Crispin fans, but "Beware of the Trains," whose stories he personally collected is better. Neither short story collection transcends the genre of 'brilliant, eccentric detective' fiction like his novels do. If you are an avid reader of Allingham, Sayers, or Innes from the Golden Age of British mystery writing, try Crispin's "Buried for Pleasure," "The Long Divorce," or "Love Lies Bleeding." You might even be tempted to put Professor Fen at the top of your great detectives list, ahead of the likes of Lord Peter, Sir John Appleby, and Mr. Campion.

The previously uncollected short crime stories of the late Edmund Crispin (pen name of Robert Bruce Montgomery) have been gathered here, including one that was unpublished during his lifetime ("Cash on Delivery").

The majority of these 26 stories are very short items (averaging between 4 and 5 pages), which were first published during the early 1950s in the London EVENING STANDARD. Most are wit-testing Puzzle stories that hinge on a relatively obscure fact, and in most cases the detective is Gervase Fen, an amateur, who is a professor of English language and literature in the University of Oxford. In some other stories, Detective-Inspector Humbleby of New Scotland Yard is the main detective--assisted occasionally by Fen. And a few stories focus on other people entirely.

One of the longer Fen-Humbleby stories in this collection--"The Mischief Done"--is seriously flawed. The main "fact" about diamonds that the story hangs on is bogus. It's as if Humbleby told Fen, "I know everything about pigs. Pigs have invisible wings and can fly. Look it up in any books about pigs or flying and you'll find it's true." If a skeptical reader were to call Humbleby's (and Crispin's) bluff about diamonds, she or he would find that the remarkable statement about them is completely false. (A parallel flawed story is Conan Doyle's "The Speckled Band," which depends completely on the ability of snakes to respond to sounds--despite the fact that ALL SNAKES ARE TOTALLY DEAF.)

Another Fen-Humbleby story--"The Undraped Torso"--is built around some dubious ideas about the appearances of scar tissue.

On the plus side, "Merry-Go-Round," "Death behind Bars" (aka "Too Clever for Scotland Yard" in EQMM), and "Who Killed Baker?" (co-authored with Geoffrey Bush) are wonderful stories.

By the way, a somewhat longer version of "Shot in the Dark" (a clever break-the-alibi story) was published in Crispin's earlier collection BEWARE OF THE TRAINS (1953) with the title "Otherwhere." It was much admired by Jacques Barzun, an academic mystery buff, who included it in one of his anthologies, THE DELIGHTS OF DETECTION (1961).

For the most part FEN COUNTRY is well printed. My own copy (a hardback, published by Walker & Co.) has a few words (like gun-ned and undress-ed) erroneously hyphenated in mid-syllable.