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Matters Criminous crime / mystery / detective literature:a critical list with discussions Crime/Mystery Series: Professor Gervase Fen"I rather think she wants to interview you, Gervase," Adam continued. "She's doing a series on famous detectives for one of the papers." Edmund Crispin's Professor Gervase FenThere are several Fen/Crispin ("Crispin" wrote no other fiction) web sites and pages, including:
(In case you came to this page you are reading from a search engine instead of through its site, I will here repeat the brief remarks on the main mystery/crime page that points here.) Gervase Fen, the Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, is the star of a too-short roster of novels and shorts, each more wildly comic than the last. The humor is not of the gross "banana-peel" variety, and the tales have their sober moments; but "Crispin" (the pen name of composer Robert Bruce Montgomery) was, right from the first paragraph of the first book, a demonstrable master of that delicious English dry wit that can culminate in madcap antics pursued with apparent utmost sobriety. The concluding (and doubtless best) Fen novel, The Glimpses of the Moon, written after a quarter-century hiatus, has all the flavor of a Marx Brothers film, despite its gruesome chief prop. The crimes, and their solutions, are--as with so many of the best of this genre--silly and more or less irrelevant to the main business, which is the bizarre situations and zany dialogues. The BooksThere were nine Fen novels and enough short stories to populate two collections. In my opinion, the shorts are really for Fen completists: "Crispin" was clearly at his best in the longer form. There was a curious gap of over a quarter-century between the penultimate Fen novel and the last one, but that last is arguably the best of all. In these lists, the links are all to used-book searches for the title (via Abebooks). Some few can still be found in print new, but not many. As usual, the search results are sorted from lowest price up (note that, as always in used-book searches from this site, the price sort is by actual book price, not total shipped price, though each listing also always shows the true total shipped cost; occasionally, a slightly more expensive title will be slightly cheaper shipped--but the differences are never much and you can easily eyeball those cases.) Most titles represent a number of varying editions, from original hardcovers to late paperback reprints. The Individual NovelsThe Fen novels were collected into a very pleasing uniform three-volume set by The Mystery Guild, and that is clearly the preferred way to collect them; nonetheless, here they are individually.
Short StoriesIf you simply must have all the available Fen, here are the two short-story collections.
Omnibus EditionsAs noted above, the three matched Crime Club omnibus volumes are the preference for collecting the Fen novels. You loaded this page on Thursday, 14 November 2024, at 08:16 GMT it was last modified on Thursday, 1 January 1970, at 00:00 GMT |
Site Mechanics:
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Site Directory:
The site's Front Page |
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(essential one-time reading) |
Introductory Material: | ||
Literate Mystery Series:
a brief list of the series discussed here |
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(the heart of the site) |
The Series (alphabetical by character last name): | ||
Roderick Alleyn (Ngaio Marsh) |
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Father Brown (G. K. Chesterton) |
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Mr. Campion (Margery Allingham) |
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Adam Dalgliesh (P. D. James) |
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Gervase Fen (Edmund Crispin) |
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Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle) |
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Inspector Maigret (Georges Simenon) |
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Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler) |
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The Continental Op (Dashiell Hammett) |
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Solar Pons (August Derleth) |
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The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (Precious Ramotswe) (Alexander McCall Smith) |
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The Saint (Simon Templar) (Leslie Charteris) |
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Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy Sayers) |
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Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout) |
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Yellowthread Street (William Marshall) |
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(new, used--find any book, anywhere in the world) |
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Buying Books New:
searching for new books via The Book Depository |
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Buying Books Used:
searching for used books via AbeBooks |
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Our General Mystery/Crime/Detective Bookshop | |||
(often the most interesting part of any site) |
Miscellaneous Topics & Info: | ||
Other Resources: internet & print resources of crime-mystery-detection interest |
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