‘We Know You’re Busy Writing…’

Forty-six detective stories by the great Edmund Crispin – a splendid hoard! Most of them feature his Oxford don, Gervase Fen, and Inspector Humbleby of Scotland Yard, and the cases turn upon a fine assortment of clues – dandelions and hearing aids, a bloodstained cat and a Leonardo drawing, a corpse with an alibi and a truly poisonous letter . . . there seems no limit to the intricacy of Edmund Crispin’s invention or the sparkle of his wit.

Compiled from Beware of the Trains, Fen Country and other disparate sources, and concluding with the recently discovered Christmas novella The Hours of Darkness, this is a long-overdue treasury of original, often startling and invariably entertaining tales by one of the acknowledged masters of the detective story. Erudite and complex, succinct yet leisurely, it is classic crime at its finest.

Robert Bruce Montgomery was born in Buckinghamshire in 1921, and was a Golden Age crime writer as well as a successful concert pianist and composer. Under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin, he wrote 9 novels featuring Oxford detective Gervase Fen and 46 short stories. A member of the famous Detection Club and neighbour of Agatha Christie, he was a renowned crime reviewer and contributed to many periodicals and newspapers, and a noted sci-fi anthologist. After the golden years of the 1950s he retired from the limelight to Devonshire until his death in 1978.