About book Fen Country: Twenty-Six Stories Featuring Gervase Fen (1981)
This is a collection of 26 very short stories, all of the detective whodunit variety, many featuring Crispin's eccentric Oxford English professor, Gervase Fen.The stories are so short that there is no room for character development or the weird side trips that make full-length adventures with Gervase Fen so much fun. They are really more like puzzles than mysteries. It's the sort of book that might have an italicized question at the end of each chapter, i.e. How did Gervase Fen know Sherlock was the murderer? Then the reader would hold the book upside down to read the answer. But it doesn't have italicized questions and upside-down answers.They certainly are quick reads, and they leave the impression of having been written quickly as well. In one story, the main character tells a deaf woman (she's not really deaf, but he thinks she is) not to be concerned if she hears him rambling around in the garden at night.An editor should have caught that.And after the first three or four chapters, the mysteries all start running together. It seems that at least five or six of the victims are pregnant women. And a fireplace poker seems to be the murder weapon of choice. I would avoid fireplaces if I were you, especially if you find yourself in an Edmund Crispin story.My favorite story in the collection is written first-person. The narrator writes mysteries from home and does this on a 9-to-5 schedule. But people assume he can write anytime, so they don't hesitate to interrupt his work, to his increasing annoyance. One particularly obnoxious couple irritates him so much that he finally kills them.One wonders if Crispin, whose real name was Bruce Montgomery, was writing from personal experience. Perhaps he had an impulse to kill some of his visitors.Perhaps he did.With a fireplace poker.
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