Among the five books I have reread for Thursday reviews this January, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), the debut of the composer Bruce Montgomery under the name Edmund Crispin, is unique in that I wasn’t completely sure I could remember the guilty party. The method by which our corpse finds itself shot in a room to which there was no access and no open windows through which a bullet could be fired was dimly in my brain somewhere, but I had the very enjoyable experience of rereading something and being able to treat it as a genuine problem…trying to work out if my suspicions came from dim remembrance of the solution or were merely smelly fish. So that was fun.

Essentially, the novel revolves around a theatrical troupe, led by esteemed playwright Robert Warner, who are in Oxford to put on Warner’s latest play, Metromania. His stock having fallen in London circles, Warner is hoping that this new play, with a star turn for his lover, the equally-esteemed actress Rachel West, will catapult him back to higher things. He has failed to account, however, for the havoc that actress Yseut Haskell — a former partner of Robert’s, and a woman who is more than willing to use her sexuality to get what she wants — will wreak on the production, resulting, we’re told in the opening chapter, in “three [people dying] by violence”.

As a debut, The Case of the Gilded Fly has narrative problems: it is over-long, and has a detective in Oxford don Gervase Fen who, in his prevaricating, Hamlet-like inaction, ends up arguably being morally responsible for one of those deaths. Certain middle chapters could be easily trimmed to keep the focus tighter, but debuts often run into this problem, and Crispin would go on to write some good novels, and some really excellent short stories, in the genre, so we can definitely say that he learned from this experience.

When it’s good, however, it’s very good. As a novel, it is endlessly quotable, from the gleeful opening dissection of the fallacies of approaching Oxford by train, via Chief Constable Sir Richard Freeman raging about the absurdities of detective fiction — “[pouring] out his fury on the ridiculous problems which they presented, and the even more ridiculous methods used in solving them” — to journalist Nigel Blake “watching a play in which a number of men and women committed a complex series of adulteries without any evident relish, to an accompaniment of jejune comment and cocktail glasses”. There’s even some solid writing to show you that Crispin can do ‘proper’ stuff, too:

It was curious, he thought, how completely death had drained her of personality… She had been an attractive girl. But that ‘had been’ was not a conventional gesture to the fact of death. It was an honest admission that without life the most beautiful body is an object of no interest. We are not bodies, thought Nigel, we are lives. And oddly, there came to him at that moment a new and firm conviction of the nature of love.

As a detective, Fen is fairly classical — interestingly, this isn’t an origin story, it being established that he has already had a hand in a few cases, though he’s keen for this one not to be seen as some great intellectual struggle:

“[T]he whole thing has been an incompetent muddle, in which the hand of the author has been painfully obvious. I find it depressing. It hasn’t been a battle of wits, it’s been a walk-over, and like all walk-overs it’s turned sour on me… It’s too easy to triumph over a second-rate mind.”

There’s a Holmesian motif in that “when an investigation was finally concluded, he became sunk in such a state of profound gloom that it was days before he could be aroused from it”, and yet it suits his puppyish nature that we’re told in the closing stage the details of the investigation are already becoming somewhat blurred in his memory. He’s not as anarchic here as he would become, but it’s a strong first showing, even if Crispin’s need for fallibility feels a little odd.

But, then, Crispin espouses many unusual views throughout this, as if moved to write this novel because he was tiring of the conventions of the Golden Age. The first, impossible, murder is placed “on a par with such actions as the drowning of superfluous kittens, the painless putting-away of aged dogs, and the necessary destruction of vermin”, and Nicholas Barclay’s views on the modernity that he must tolerate every day feel like the sort of complaints one could easily and lazily apply to the world as it is 80 years after this was written, the…

“…abominable, sentimental, mob-ruled world of cheap newspapers and cheaper minds, where every imbecile is articulate and every folly tolerated, where the arts are dying out and the intellect is scorned, where every little cheap-jack knows what he likes and what he thinks. Our moralities, our democracy, have taught us to suffer fools gladly, and now we suffer from an overplus of fools. Every fool dead is an advance, and be damned to humanity and virtue and charity and Christian tolerance.”

A few conventions must, of course, be observed, like Inspector Cordery “relieved at [the] fortunate manifestation of an intelligence lower than his own” and Sir Richard expressing his dislike of “the sort of detective story in which one of the characters propounds views on how detective stories should be written”. So Crispin is able to play the game, and would go on to play it very well in later works, but you do feel the sense of a genre on the turn, of the lustre wearing off the Golden Age and something new that isn’t quite sure what form to take yet coming in to have its time in the sun.

Most importantly, I enjoyed this revisit, and have enjoyed this January project overall. Perhaps none of the five books quite lived up to my memories of them, but it’s lovely to see that a significantly-increased genre coverage hasn’t completely destroyed some of these early investigations for me. Maybe this could be a thing every January, hein?

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Bizarrely, I own three different copies of this book, but chose for this reread the Collins Crime Club hardback reissue from 2017 pictured above. Man, those editions are wonderful, and it’s to be regretted that the series didn’t take flight in the way the British Library Crime Classics have. They’re gorgeous books, and I treasure every one I own.

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See also

Martin Edwards: Especially for such a very young author, this is a well-contrived mystery, although it’s still, in my opinion, clearly inferior to books such as The Moving Toyshop and Buried for Pleasure. Yseut, the victim, is suitably unpleasant, but Fen is also, as Crispin seems to acknowledge, pretty irritating too – especially when he makes clear that he knows whodunit early on, but declines to tell. I know Poirot did this time and again, but Fen doesn’t carry it off quite as well, and the killer strikes again before the final unmasking.. A critic in The Independent even said in a review that he wished Fen, rather than Yseut, had been the victim! … For a Golden Age fan, Crispin is always worth reading, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be had here from his humour and his evocation of Oxford. But for all its merits, it is an apprentice work.