Talking About Detective Fiction by P. D. James Read Free Book Online Page B

profession apart from writing, and each produced one book which has generally proved the favourite among their work. Edmund Crispin, following his time at St. John’s College, Oxford, where he was part of the generation which included Kingsley Amis, spent two years as an organ scholar and choirmaster. Like many other detective writers, he made excellent use of his personal experience, both of Oxford and of his career as a musician. His hero is Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at St. Christopher’s College, who made his appearance in 1944 with
The Case of the Gilded Fly
. Gervase Fen is a true original, a ruddy-faced man with unruly hair, much given to witticisms and, appropriately enough, quotations from the classics, who romps through his cases with infectious
joie de vivre
in books which are genuinely very funny We meet his wife, Dolly, a placid comfortable lady who sits peacefully knitting, apparently undisturbed by her husband’s propensity for investigating murder, and who takes no part in his adventures, contenting herself by reminding him not to wake the children whenhe returns home. We learn nothing of the sex of these children and are only surprised that Professor Fen has found the time and energy to father them. He seems to be rarely inconvenienced by academic duties and in one book,
Buried for Pleasure
(1948), he becomes a parliamentary candidate, narrowly escaping what for him would have been the inconvenience of being elected. Crispin’s most ingenious book is generally regarded as
The Moving Toyshop
(1946), which begins when the young poet Richard Cadogan, arriving late at night in Oxford, casually opens an unlocked door and finds himself in a toyshop with the dead body of a woman on the floor. Reasonably, he summons the police, but they arrive to find no toyshop and no corpse. Fen joins forces with Cadogan and they clatter through Oxford in Fen’s old car, “Lily Christine,” causing maximum damage and disturbance to the populace in their determination to solve the mystery.
    Crispin’s books are always elegantly written with a cast of engaging, witty characters. Most readers at some point in the story will laugh aloud. Crispin is a farceur, and the ability successfully to combine this less-than-subtle humour with murder is very rare in detective fiction. One modern writer who comes to mind is SimonBrett, whose hero—if the word can be regarded as appropriate—Charles Paris is an unsuccessful and hard-drinking actor separated from his wife. Like Edmund Crispin, Simon Brett makes use of his own experience—in his case as a playwright for radio and television—and, like Crispin, he can combine humour with a credible mystery solved by an original and believable private eye.
    Cyril Hare was a barrister who became a county court judge; he took his writing name from his London home, Cyril Mansions in Battersea, and his chambers in Hare Court. Like Edmund Crispin, he made effective use of his professional experience and expertise, creating in his hero, Francis Pettigrew, a humane, intelligent but not particularly successful barrister who, unlike Professor Fen, is a reluctant rather than avid amateur detective. Like Crispin he has a felicitous style, and his humour, although less laughter-provoking, has wit and subtlety. His best-known book—and, I would argue, by far the most successful—is
Tragedy at Law
, published in 1942. This novel, which is happily in print, is also something of a period piece, since we the readers move with the Honourable Sir William Hereward Barber, a judge of the High Court of Justice, as he travels round the towns of the South WestCircuit. This perambulation in great state of an assize judge has now been abolished with the creation of the Crown Court; as the book is set in the early days of the Second World War, we have the interest both of fairly recent history and of a now dead tradition. The plot is well worked out, credible and, as with the majority