A posthumous collection occasionally wrong billed as “Twenty-six stories featuring Gervase Fen” (there should really be, at least, a comma after ‘stories’, since series detective Fen isn’t in all of them), Fen Country (1979) was, I believe, the first collection of Edmund Crispin’s short fiction I read. And now I’m back, to get some thoughts on record.

Yes, a saner blogger might split this over two or three posts, but I’ve become accustomed to no-one reading what I write and so I’ll just dump all my capsule reviews here and know there’s no way anyone is going to read through all of them at once. Feel free to return and peck at my impressions piecemeal over the years ahead, eh?

It’s worth noting that most of the stories here were written for inclusion in newspapers, and so would have been constructed on the grounds of fitting in X inches of double-width column. They say restriction is the soul of creativity, though, or if they don’t they should, so maybe that bodes well.

Right, this is going to be a long post, so let’s get down to it…

‘Who Killed Baker?’ (1950) came from an idea proposed, or so I understand, but Geoffrey Bush, son of the author Christopher Bush. It’s an apparently minor mystery of an eternal triangle that plays out very obviously…until you realise that you more than likely fell into the trap so very, very neatly laid for you. Always a joy to revisit this and see how cannily this style of story can mislead, and a great opener to set out the stall of this collection.

“You mustn’t leave me. I don’t know why she’s doing this. I’m frightened,” is the entreaty offered by an elderly relative in Death and Aunt Fancy’ (1953). The young man of whom it is asked, however, sees no sense it in, departs, and must contend with the murder and burglary that results. Clever how Crispin draws your eye to the key clue only to dismiss it for you, but this sort of plot was pretty old hat by now…so he does well to make it propulsive and interesting.

I’m not entirely sure ‘The Hunchback Cat’ (1954) makes complete sense. Another murder of an elderly relative, this one locked in his tower room, offers a good surprise ending, but the convolutions to get there really do need more space to explain them, and the lack of time taken over them renders the one, apparently telling, contradiction in the plot somewhat moot. Crispin does well in a small space, but perhaps overreaches himself here by trying to write a longer story than he was allowed to.

‘The Lion’s Tooth’ (1955) stands as an example of how much you can do in a short space, with a kidnapped child’s only chance of rescue being a nun’s fevered nonsense rambling of the phrase “the tooth of the lion”. It’s a clever idea, and even with that basis established Crispin still has to work in a few keys ideas to make the whole thing work, which he manages easily. Not vintage, but very good.

‘Gladstone’s Candlestick’ (1955) is…less successful. See, if a criminal were to execute this theft, there’ld be many, many questions and suspicion would inevitably fall upon them. Only the serendipitous intervention of a third party sees suspicion deflected, but even then there’s some dodgy temporising which would fall through at the slightest investigation. A good parable about taking evidence at face value, but not much cop as detection.

There’s another theft — this time of a valuable miniature painting — in ‘The Man Who Lost His Head’ (1955), and again the lack of space Crispin has tells against him. I can’t help but feel that this would be more satisfying as a subplot in a novel, because the raft of closing revelations about how could be more carefully worked in there. Reminds me of the Kek Huuygens stories of Robert L. Fish, but that’s about all I can say here.

Weirdly, I remembered the core trick ‘The Two Sisters’ (1955) — concerning a deaf housekeeper — as being used in one of the Mr. Strang stories by William Brittain, but clearly I was wrong. The clever thing here is how easily you are misled by something you probably believe, and how cannily again Crispin hides it in not very much space. Beyond that, not much to say, except that I’ld place it high in the second tier of Crispin’s short fiction.

‘Outrage in Stepney, a.k.a. ‘A Message for Herr Dietrich‘ (1955) highlights how adept Crispin was at a turn of phrase — c.f. “Communism’s musty, Victorian-sounding zoological similes.” — and shows his range, about which more later, by putting his toe over the line into the region occupied by the spy story. And a very good spy story it is, too, despite the odd convenience that allows it all to happen…which is, after all, a fairly regular occurrence in the mystery story, so let’s not complain too loudly, eh?

There’s something borderline impossible about ‘A Country to Sell’ (1959): how can the contents of a phone call heard only by one man, in a house with no other telephone extensions, have been divined by outside parties? The answer is simple and ingenious, and drifting so completely from public awareness that in another 20 years I reckon most of the people who read this will have no idea how it worked. We must preserve this knowledge! Clever stuff, with even a little space for some characterisation of Fen (“He is fond of compliments, but likes accuracy even better.”).

Fen disappears at this point — from the stories, I mean, not as one of the plots — with his usual police sparring partner Inspector Humbleby given a chance to shine in the next two. ‘A Case in Camera’ (1955) is one of those tricksy stories where the revelation hinges on a small detail, and it’s to be wondered if the precise detection used herein will ever be utilised again. It’s tiny, interesting, and lovely to see the professional detective getting on with their job astutely without some genius amateur hanging off their neck.

Humbleby Rides Again in ‘Blood Sport’, a.k.a. ‘The Unloaded Gun’ (1954), which sees a shooting in a rural district given an implicit solution that hangs again on a minor point, this time thanks to Hans Gross. I particularly enjoy this sort of “Huh, I never knew that…” detection concerning physical properties of things, and Crispin is to be applauded for weaving it in to such a tight, canny little tale.

‘The Pencil’ (1953) is so hard-edged, and so unlike anything else I’d read by Crispin on my first encounter, that it lodged firmly in my mind and refused to let go. So I’m delighted to report that this speedy detailing of a plot entered into by a hired killer was as bracing and superb on second encounter. The sheer weary, tough nature of this is something to behold, and if you didn’t know the author up front it would be a long, long time before you guessed correctly its origin.

I’m not entirely sure the closing, apparently conclusive point of ‘Windhover Cottage’ (1954) would be quite as telling as Crispin seems to think, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s fun waiting to see precisely which way the revelation here is going to go — you think you know that a woman has killed her philandering husband, but maybe that’s our author laying a trap for you — and it fulfils its intentions well, but it’s a minor work when placed against some of the excellence on display here.

Speaking of excellence, ‘The House by the River’ (1953) contains what’s probably one of my ten favourite clues in the whole of the Golden Age, and as such I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting it here. A deceptively simple case of a parlourmaid found strangled on a senior policeman’s property, it’s clever ideas like this that really compel Crispin to me and show what an excellent ideas man he was. And the tone is note-perfect, too. A real gem, just a shame it has such a dull title.

Another clever idea lies at the heart of ‘After Evensong’ (1953), a semi-inverted tale in which a forbidden couple who have just murdered her husband so that they might be together seize on an opportune misunderstanding to avoid suspicion for the crime. The double layer of this that easily dismantles those plans is what makes it so pleasing, as does some wonderful turns of phrase (“But Masters was not wise; he was only clever.”).

A borderline-impossible poisoning confronts us in ‘Death Behind Bars’, a.k.a. ‘Too Clever for Scotland Yard’ (1960), but the eventual solution is somewhat undone in bafflement when you realise that surely (rot13) gur pbecfr jbhyq unir unq cncre va vgf fgbznpu. Perhaps this is more an experiment in form, with the story framed as a letter…but even that’s not really necessary. Interesting in how it subverts the central dynamic, but not one to linger over.

The satirically-titled ‘We Know You’re Busy Writing, But We Thought You Wouldn’t Mind If We Just Dropped in for a Minute’ (1969) is decidedly less cutting than I remembered. An author dislikes the various interruptions to his day. Why not unplug the phone, mate? Boo-frickin-hoo. Clearly this was a topic dear to Crispin as the story is over twice the length of almost anything else in this collection, but he’s indulged himself to no particular end and it shows.

Before there were Tony Medawar’s Bodies from the Library [ss] (2018-present) collections, where else would you make unpublished stories available? So the unseen ‘Cash on Delivery’ would have been a real boon for this collection. And this story of an assassin hired by a man to kill his wife and make it look like a burglary is perfectly acceptable…until the last few lines when the water muddies somewhat and throws things into doubt. What, you wonder, was the purpose of that?

Fen returns now, firstly in ‘Shot in the Dark’ (1952), concerning a love quadrangle of sorts and a body that has a bullet in it despite nobody in the vicinity hearing a gunshot. The resolution is fine, but I find it difficult to believe that someone would be (rot13) fb vasnghngrq gung gurl’q zneel gur zna gurl’er nyzbfg pregnva unf whfg xvyyrq gurve oebgure. But then maybe I’m just not an old romantic, eh?

Another long story in ‘The Mischief Done’ (1972), and another one that really doesn’t need its verbiage — even Fen’s meta-awareness that Humbleby’s story is dragging doesn’t save it. Crispin rarely writes cheaply — we have here “exiguous”, “mafficking”, and “redound” to send you scurrying for a thesaurus — but the core idea here (concerning diamonds) is clever in that tiny way of most of these tales, and deserves less padding to be able to shine.

A delightfully playful circular matter of some forged documents confronts us in ‘Merry-Go-Round’ (1953), with an obnoxious policeman given the run-around by an expert who he had previously insulted. There’s not much to it, but it evinces the style of playfulness in Crispin’s writing that so few others come close to matching, and as such I thoroughly enjoyed the too brief time spent in its coils.

A dead body hidden in a partially-filled grave provides the interest in ‘Occupational Risk’, a.k.a. ‘What’s His Line?’ (1955): which of three men was this body, in life, due to confront with their responsibilities to their illegitimate child? One of those ‘X in A is Y in B’ stories that would occur to someone with as fertile a brain as Crispin, but a minor and specialised example that passes a few minutes and then fades from memory.

“[H]owever erratic her views on Beowulf or Dryden, [Ann] was nobody’s fool,” is Fen’s summation of the student who asks him for help in ‘Dog in the Night-Time’ (1954). A diamond might have gone missing, and it’s a clever piece of negative evidence that points the guilty party’s way…except, could it not also apply to the dead man who had access to the property in question several weeks before? A lovely idea — negative evidence is my favourite type of evidence — but not as conclusive as we’re led to believe here.

A slightly hoary idea points the way to insurance fraud in ‘Man Overboard’ (1954), with American brothers making a new life for themselves in England and one of them allegedly dying in a boating accident. More interesting than anything in the story, however, is Inspector Humbleby’s assertion that “blackmail has…a punitive function”, especially as the general view in fiction of this era was that blackmailers were the very worst of the worst. But Crispin makes a good point here, and I’ll think of it frequently.

‘The Undraped Torso’ (1954) presents us with a man who is only too happy to have his photograph in a national newspaper objecting to his photo being taken while he sunbathed on the beach. The answer here relies on a principle that is surely completely out of date now, and since it’s a visual principle I inevitably question how fully it would apply. But I believe Crispin elsewhere in this collection, so I’m not going to start doubting him now.

Finally, ‘Wolf!’ (1953) in which a practical joker is found shot and leaves Humbleby with a difficult choice between “robbery with violence on one hand, and a calculated parricide on the other”. Again, this is an old dodge, but it’s also remarkably telling, too, not least because I’ve had the exact thing happen to me — not someone dying while on the phone, I mean, but the key clue which points the way. Experience counts for a lot, and so I’m going to give this a pass.

Woof, well, pick the bones out of that, eh? Let’s start with a Top 5:

1. ‘The House by the River’ (1953)
2. ‘A Country to Sell’ (1959)
3. ‘After Evensong’ (1953)
4. ‘Merry-Go-Round’ (1953)
5. ‘The Pencil’ (1953)

What’s impressive here is how Crispin manages to write so briefly without ever writing cheaply — who else would casually drop “irrefragable” into a newspaper story, for one? The range of ideas in here is quite fabulous, and while not every story is a complete delight there was much here to enjoy at second reading — most of them being memorable enough for me to recall where they were going, which is no mean feat when you consider how much has passed in front of my eyes since first reading this.

Might it be controversial to suggest that Crispin was more successful in his short stories than in his novels? The books distinguish themselves at times, but overall the plots blur into chases and nonsense, where here there’s a generally tight rein kept on everything right up to the final full stop. I have slightly less positive memories of Crispin’s other short story collection, Beware of the Trains (1953), but then the stories are longer in that collection and so maybe allow more space for narrative looseness to establish itself, hein?

I’ll reread that in due course, but Fen Country was a lot of fun and I don’t regret revisiting it. Lovely for such small genre pieces to pass so delightfully.