Holy Disorders
A review of Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin
Apart from the odd short story I had not read any of Bruce Montgomery’s works, Edmund Crispin is his nom de plume, so this was a step into the unknown for me. This is the second of his novels to feature the eccentric Oxford don, Gervase Fen, who is the series detective and was originally published in 1945. The publication date is important as, although this is a murder mystery involving priests and organists, the Second World War in the form of German collaborators plays an important role in the unfolding of the narrative.
At the outset, it seems to be a straightforward, slightly twee, very funny, tale of ecclesiastical jealousy, rivalries, intrigue, and murder. Set in the cathedral city of Tolnbridge where Fen is holidaying, pursuing insects. He sends a telegram to Geoffrey Vintner, a composer who plays the role of his Dr Watson, to come down as the organist has been attacked, oh, and to bring a butterfly net. This unwieldy piece of impedimenta generates moments of pure comedy and farce as Vintner struggles to make his way to the West Country, ignoring an anonymous letter warning him off and several attempts on his life and picking up a minor Earl called Henry Fielding along the way, whose principal purpose seems to be the feed for a gag about Tom Jones.
The organist is poisoned, on the first occasion only sufficiently to hospitalise him but the second time, in the hospital itself, successfully. There is a second death in the cathedral, the victim found in the tomb of a dead bishop, having been hit by a tombstone. If this is not enough to be going on with, the plot veers off, rather like a Gladys Mitchell story, into the world of witchcraft, the bishop whose tomb is in the cathedral was a notorious witchfinder, coupled with international espionage and German collaboration and child abuse. The latter theme, the grooming of a young girl who is drugged with marijuana, is rather treated as a minor subplot, but to modern readers is probably the most disturbing element of the book. Clearly not all is well within the cathedral’s precincts.
Fen realises that there is, or at least was, something in the vicinity of the organ and the bishop’s tomb, the discovery of which was life-threatening and that certain parties had to go to some lengths to remove it. Fen is on a mission to discover what it is and who are behind the murders and the plot. He works his way through a bewildering number of suspects and at some peril to his own life, eventually rumbles what is going on.
I am not quite sure about Fen as a central character. He is eccentric, ego-centric, smug, abrasive, tolerated only because he is able to cut the Gordian knot and solve a mystery that baffles mere mortals. However, he is not a character that I warmed to and seems to be a pastiche of many other amateur sleuths I have encountered. Indeed, it is hard not to conclude that the book is a pastiche of the detective fiction genre, drawing inspiration from a wide range of influences. My favourite two are the nod to Edgar Allen Poe when Fen and Vintner visit the gloomy cleric Garbin who has a pet raven and a wife called Lenore and a couple of pubs whose names Brian Flynn would have been proud of, The Whale and Coffin and the Three Shrews. There is even the obligatory love interest as confirmed bachelor Vintner takes a shine for Frances Butler, only to be sadly disillusioned.
The narrative is strewn with literary references and quotations and although Crispin wears his intellect on his sleeve, sometimes using vocabulary that tests the knowledge of even his most literate of readers, it is never being clever for the sake of being clever. His book is a riot from start to finish, gloriously funny, sometimes bonkers, occasionally dark, often perplexing, and with the happy knack of creating a world that you can immediately immerse yourself in and forget reality. Terrific stuff.
