Customer Reviews

Swan Song

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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."

The ubiquitous Gervaise Fen finds himself literally "on stage" and proves again that his powers of observation and deduction are second to none. The language and style of Crispin are reminiscent of Dorothy Sayers and are fully as entertaining. Great vacation reading, as it is very hard to put down.

All of Crispin's boks are wonderful, funny mysteries. I am only sorry that he was so creative that he spent a lot of his time doing other things.

Edmund Crispin is an author of classic murder mysteries who wrote his works in the early to mid-20th century, during a period when Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Marjorie Allingham were also active. It's an enjoyable era in fiction. I had enjoyed The Long Divorce: Gervase Fen, #8 very much, and decided to read another.

While the Fen character in "Swan Song" seems to have less dignity and poise than he did in the earlier work, his capacity to keep the action moving at a sturdy pace continues. The two new central characters, Elizabeth and Adam, are charming and enjoyable, especially the first few pages of their interactions with one another, which read like a Wodehouse novel or a Coward play. These types of witty comments and attitudes can still be seen in classic "screwball" comedies from the the 1930s; think It Happened One Night (Remastered Black & White) with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, The Philadelphia Story (Two-Disc Special Edition) with Cary Grant, James Stewart and Katherine Hepburn, or Bringing Up Baby [VHS] again with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.

I enjoyed the Opera and music ambiances and the brief glimpses of Oxford college life. It appears the author, whose real name was Robert Bruce Montgomery, had attended Oxford and later had become a successful composer. He was also for a time a schoolmaster. His understanding of all these venues adds considerable veracity to his descriptions, while his parody of the personalities that populate them seemed not only amusing but probably "spot-on."

The prose style, as in the earlier book, is rather convoluted and may not appeal to all readers; dialogue rather than narrative prose is more heavily employed in today's works, making them seem almost terse by comparison. The vocabulary, too, is very arched; I don't think I've seen so many novel words used to describe ordinary things and circumstances outside of a thesaurus (sounds like a dinosaur, doesn't it?) Much of this is a matter of period and genre. Most writers of fiction with a satirical or humorous bent used the same wordy and slightly "off-the-wall" prose style during the early half of the 20th century. Authors like P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through (A Jeeves and Bertie Novel), Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, Private Lives: Three Plays, and James Thurber, My World-and Welcome to It (Harvest Book), were all well know for it, and it remained a popular narrative form even with Erma Bombeck, The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, in later decades of the century.

The plot is particularly well designed and is an example of the "locked room" mystery. All the clues are there. They are subtle and very carefully disbursed through the story. Those with more experience of the classic murder mystery genre will probably be alert to them. I know I was. Although I knew how the first murder was committed very early on, I was not really sure who had been responsible, and I was quite amazed at how complicated the event had been when it was explained. As to the second murder, how it was done and why, I was totally taken by surprise, not because the author broke any rules, but because of his deft slight-of-hands in misdirecting my attention.

A pleasant afternoon's reading.