[SBB]∎ [PDF] Frequent Hearses Classic Crime Edmund Crispin 9780140093551 Books

Frequent Hearses Classic Crime Edmund Crispin 9780140093551 Books

Download As PDF : Frequent Hearses Classic Crime Edmund Crispin 9780140093551 Books

Frequent Hearses Classic Crime Edmund Crispin 9780140093551 Books

If you want to become a best-selling mystery writer, be prolific. Quantity, not quality is the key to success in the literary world. Publishers want an Agatha Christie or an Erle Stanley Gardner, both of whom reliably cranked 'em out year after year for decades.

But as a reader I cherish the works of oddball writers like Edmund Crispin who wrote nine mysteries and two books of short stories and left this world leaving his fans pining for more. Crispin's books are well written and full of eccentric characters and they give fascinating glimpses into whatever professional world he choose as a setting. Here it's the British film industry immediately after WWII. The author knew his way around that one because he was a long-time composer of film music. So he got to show off his insider knowledge and poke a bit of fun at himself along the way. Early on, one character speaks of a film composer "like one who refers to some necessary but unromantic bodily function."

Certainly the film industry has always operated on the philosophy that those behind the camera can be replaced, while those in front of the camera can't. In the film world (then as now) it's the actors and actresses who count and this plot revolves around two actresses who have little in common except that they've both slept with the same actor. Madge Crane is a BIG STAR. Gloria Scott is an unknown seeking her first major role. Madge Crane has a mother and three brothers. Gloria Scott appears to have come out of the mists, and has no family and few friends. And Madge Crane is alive and Gloria Scott isn't.

Scotland Yard sends out quiet, unassuming, but highly competent Detective-Inspector Humbleby who meets up with his old friend Gervase Fen - Oxford Professor and amateur detective. They've hunted together before and make excellent foils for one another. Both are men of intelligence and culture and are worthy of this very erudite writer. If I tell you that in the first chapter, you'll encounter the words "congeries" "equinoctial" "deleterious" "sempiternal" "exiguous" and "inchoate" you'll get the idea. This author clearly saw no reason to assume that his readers were idiots, even if we DO like mysteries.

As to the plot, it's a mystery so there are twists and red herrings and surprises galore. I personally think that the bit involving the maze is over-done, but the head-to-head collision of Humbleby and the Bolshevik butler is one of the finest things I've ever read. Speaking of Humbleby, you'll notice that he takes orders from the Commissioner and investigates cases himself even though he is a mere Detective-Inspector and drives (badly) a modest car. In more recent times, P.D. James' Scotland Yard man is a "Commander" who drives a Jaguar and is accompanied by several Detective-Inspectors to take notes and fetch his tea. Rank inflation seems to have taken a firm grip on the British crime-fighting community.

This author never takes himself too seriously and neither do his characters. That's what makes them so timeless and entertaining. I only wish there were more Crispin books to savor.


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Frequent Hearses Classic Crime Edmund Crispin 9780140093551 Books Reviews

This is not the Edmund Crispin that I remember from the days of my youth, nor indeed the Gervase Fen. Pedestrian and virtually humourless, it plods to its unexciting end.
Very short novel but that maybe be due to the fact that it moves along at a nice pace. Always enjoy reading Edmund Crispin very old world and true to the era
This is one of the two best of Edmund Crispin's Gevase Fen mysteries. It draws on the author's personal experience with film production. It treats the whole with a light, but serious hand. There are none of the hijinks with Lily Christine that can be so annoying. Read it and enjoy. (The other one of the two best is "Love Lies Bleeding.")
As always, Crispin is a delight to read. The plot is well constructed, the dialog sparkles.
I was a little disappointed because "Glimpses of the Moon" was so wonderful whereas this book was only a very good, competently written and amazingly literate detective story. It felt a little dated to me....although the Bloomsbury Reader characters seemed sort of like archtypes and thus, ageless. Still. The plot was tight and the characters were interesting. The humor was still there, sly and dry. Once again, the dictionary feature of my got a nice workout as I looked up the amazing words the author uses. If you like a classic British detective story written with wit and eccentric characters, you will like this book.
Edmund Crispen is the exemplar of the Golden Age of mystery writing. Published in 1950 and set in the years just after the end of World War II in an England still subjected to rationing, Oxford Don and amateur detective Gervase Fen is an advisor on historical details for a hare-brained bio-pic of the poet Pope. The story begins with a lovely young woman getting out of a taxi at the middle of a London bridge and falling to her death by drowning in the Thames River. Who was she and what relation does her death have to the second death? The studio scenes have a touch of satire to them as do those at a rented mansion with a superior butler. Fen and his Scotland Yard friend do solve the puzzle after much literate conversation.
Gervase Fen is Edmund Crispin's Peter Wimsey, not a Poirot but still in the Big Leagues of Classic British Mysteries. The acerbic comments on the industry which makes movies, and on anything else that comes his jaundiced way, is one of the appealing features of the book. It is in the form of the classic puzzler, but not such in substance; that is to say, the solution propounded by the detective cannot have been educed from the clues given the reader. That's fine with me but will offend purist followers of the genre. Fen's source of entry into the crime-solving is an appealingly drawn Scotland Yard detective. He is a good counterweight to Fen's sometime sardonic treatment of people.
All in all, good reading for the traditional mystery reader and the general reader, as well. Not a book for the hard-boiled detective fans or those seeking action as in gunplay, beatings and the like.
If you want to become a best-selling mystery writer, be prolific. Quantity, not quality is the key to success in the literary world. Publishers want an Agatha Christie or an Erle Stanley Gardner, both of whom reliably cranked 'em out year after year for decades.

But as a reader I cherish the works of oddball writers like Edmund Crispin who wrote nine mysteries and two books of short stories and left this world leaving his fans pining for more. Crispin's books are well written and full of eccentric characters and they give fascinating glimpses into whatever professional world he choose as a setting. Here it's the British film industry immediately after WWII. The author knew his way around that one because he was a long-time composer of film music. So he got to show off his insider knowledge and poke a bit of fun at himself along the way. Early on, one character speaks of a film composer "like one who refers to some necessary but unromantic bodily function."

Certainly the film industry has always operated on the philosophy that those behind the camera can be replaced, while those in front of the camera can't. In the film world (then as now) it's the actors and actresses who count and this plot revolves around two actresses who have little in common except that they've both slept with the same actor. Madge Crane is a BIG STAR. Gloria Scott is an unknown seeking her first major role. Madge Crane has a mother and three brothers. Gloria Scott appears to have come out of the mists, and has no family and few friends. And Madge Crane is alive and Gloria Scott isn't.

Scotland Yard sends out quiet, unassuming, but highly competent Detective-Inspector Humbleby who meets up with his old friend Gervase Fen - Oxford Professor and amateur detective. They've hunted together before and make excellent foils for one another. Both are men of intelligence and culture and are worthy of this very erudite writer. If I tell you that in the first chapter, you'll encounter the words "congeries" "equinoctial" "deleterious" "sempiternal" "exiguous" and "inchoate" you'll get the idea. This author clearly saw no reason to assume that his readers were idiots, even if we DO like mysteries.

As to the plot, it's a mystery so there are twists and red herrings and surprises galore. I personally think that the bit involving the maze is over-done, but the head-to-head collision of Humbleby and the Bolshevik butler is one of the finest things I've ever read. Speaking of Humbleby, you'll notice that he takes orders from the Commissioner and investigates cases himself even though he is a mere Detective-Inspector and drives (badly) a modest car. In more recent times, P.D. James' Scotland Yard man is a "Commander" who drives a Jaguar and is accompanied by several Detective-Inspectors to take notes and fetch his tea. Rank inflation seems to have taken a firm grip on the British crime-fighting community.

This author never takes himself too seriously and neither do his characters. That's what makes them so timeless and entertaining. I only wish there were more Crispin books to savor.