Holy Disorders (1946)

In a small cathedral town in the west of England during WWII, the cathedral organist is poisoned and the Precentor is crushed beneath a falling tombstone. Is it the work of Satanists or German spies, or just a squabble about a family inheritance? Professor Gervase Fen, who happens to be visiting the town, investigates.

A perfect blend of high and low comedy and detection. ( )

Classic Golden Age Crispin:

http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/old-favourites-holy-diso... ( )

First published back in 1946 by the pseudonymous Edwin Crispin (real name the rather more macho sounding Bruce Montgomery) this is the second offering of ‘murder most literary’ as his detective, English Professor Gervase Fen, enjoys a little jaunt to the West Country and solves some hideous and dastardly crimes along the way. Actually, I didn’t mean to read the second book first, but I accidentally picked up the wrong one in the bookshop. Nevertheless, we shall persevere.

As the lengthy Chaucer quotation at the start might hint, this book expects general knowledge from its readers that no publisher would assume these days (and more’s the pity). Although this is a genuine mystery story, the author spends a lot of time having fun with literary allusion and peppers his writing with quotations in untranslated French and Latin. He devotes an entire chapter to parodying Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem, The Raven, while Professor Fen interviews a suspect, and you very much get the impression this is entirely frivolous nonsense of the kind that I happen to love, but I can see why others would find it silly and pointless.

Although the series of novels are, I understand, normally set in Oxford and Gervase Fen is a sort of proto, amateur Morse, here he visits his friend the Dean of some Cathedral or other (who never actually appears) during the vac. As it happens, the organist is seriously assaulted and later murdered in hospital and so, Fen invites his friend Geoffrey Vinter, a composer, to take over his job for a while, and act as a dim witted Watson to his Holmes as they interview all the clergy, their families and the weird yokels to try to figure out what the bloody, buggering hell is going on.

As you might guess from the publication date, Nazi plots do feature, but there’s also a strange nod to Husymans and Satanism and black magic which seems obligatory in all mysteries set in and around the Church. Professor Fen is suitably eccentric and intellectually arrogant, actually to the point of being damn irritating, but he’s nearly always funny and I reserve final judgement until I read about him in the dreaming spires of his natural habitat. An ongoing project for me, I think, but a good start.

Read my review at Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog! ( )

An absolutely superb mystery: beautifully plotted, and hysterically funny. I laughed like a drain at just about every other page, and after the raven in chapter 8 I just have to go and read some Edgar Allan Poe.

Excellent. Hysterical. Go and read it. ( )