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The Case of the Gilded Fly (Gervase Fen, #1)

Edmund Crispin

Start date: October 15, 2021

Finish date: November 6, 2021

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What Members Thought

Feb 19, 2016 Susan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This Golden Age detective novel begins with eleven people arriving in wartime Oxford, most of whom are involved with putting on a new play out of the glare of London critics. We are told that within the week, three of these people will die by violence, and the author sets the scene nicely with a cast of characters that seem full of jealousy and intrigue. These include the playwright Robert Warner, actress Yseut Haskell who seems universally disliked, organist Donald Fellowes, who is in love with This Golden Age detective novel begins with eleven people arriving in wartime Oxford, most of whom are involved with putting on a new play out of the glare of London critics. We are told that within the week, three of these people will die by violence, and the author sets the scene nicely with a cast of characters that seem full of jealousy and intrigue. These include the playwright Robert Warner, actress Yseut Haskell who seems universally disliked, organist Donald Fellowes, who is in love with the uncaring Yseut, and journalist Nigel Blake, who studied under Gervase Fen and is hoping to meet actress Helen Haskell, Yseut's sister, and who is the main character we witness events through. He is a likeable and pleasant young man who has been invalided out of the war after Dunkirk and whose knowledge of both Fen and the cast tie the book together nicely.

As Nigel attends rehearsals we witness the anger, jealousy and dispute that Yseut causes. Events escalate until they end in murder. This is almost a locked door mystery, with a lot of motives, no alibis and an almost impossible crime. Still, Gervase Fen, who is great friends with Sir Richard Freeman, the Chief Constable of Oxford, states he knows who is responsible for the crime. Gervase is a "cherubic, naive, volatile and entirely delightful" character, totally uninhibited and often rude, extremely intelligent and a specialist in English Literature, which is Sir Richard's passion in the same way that Fen is obsessed with crime.

This is a very atmospheric novel. I enjoyed the setting, with the use of rep theatre, Oxford University and the wartime era being used to great effect. The plot was convuluted but interesting, the characters good. Yseult is the wicked witch of the piece, causing scenes of arguments and mistrust in every scene she appears in. Some may feel certain characters are criticised unfairly on grounds of morality, but you must remember when the book is set and judge it on that basis. Many authors from this period use language and state arguments that are not seen as acceptable now, but were perfectly normal then. If you like books set in this era and enjoy authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Nicholas Blake or Christianna Brand, you will certainly enjoy this. ...more

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Oct 02, 2021 Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, murder, edmund-crispin, music, theatre, oxford

2 October 2021 marks the 100th birthday of Robert Bruce Montgomery, composer and writer, who wrote detective stories under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin, and musical scores including for the early films in the Carry On series. To celebrate, I read The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), the first book to feature Crispin’s detective, Oxford don Gervase Fen. This was my first time reading the book, though I have read a couple of others in the series before. This was a humorous book full of literary allu ...more

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Jan 02, 2018 ShanDizzy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Gervase Fen is my new favorite amateur detective. Here's the way he's described by his journalist friend Nigel "...that there was something extraordinarily school-boyish about Gervase Fen. Cherubic, naive, volatile, and entirely delightful, he wandered the earth taking a genuine interest in things and people unfamiliar, while maintaining a proper sense of authority in connection with his own subject. On literature his comments were acute, penetrating, and extremely sophisticated; on any other to Gervase Fen is my new favorite amateur detective. Here's the way he's described by his journalist friend Nigel "...that there was something extraordinarily school-boyish about Gervase Fen. Cherubic, naive, volatile, and entirely delightful, he wandered the earth taking a genuine interest in things and people unfamiliar, while maintaining a proper sense of authority in connection with his own subject. On literature his comments were acute, penetrating, and extremely sophisticated; on any other topic he invariably pretended complete ignorance and an anxious willingness to be instructed, though it generally came out eventually that he knew more about it than his interlocutor, for his reading in the forty-two years since his first appearance on this planet, had been systematic and enormous. If this ingenuousness had been affectation or merely arrested development, it would have been simply irritating; but it was perfectly sincere, and derived from the genuine intellectual humility of a man who has read much and in so doing has been able to contemplate the enormous spaces of knowledge which must inevitably always lie beyond his reach. In temperament, he was incurably romantic, though he ordered his life in a rigidly reasonable way. To men and affairs, his attitude was neither cynical nor optimistic, but one of never-failing fascination. This resulted in a sort of unconscious amoralism, since he was always so interested in what people were doing, and why they were doing it, that it never occurred to him to assess the morality of their actions."

Edmund Crispin's intelligent writing is simply a joy to read. "So Nigel turned his attention back to what was left of Yseut. It was curious, he thought, how completely death had drained her of personality...We are not bodies, thought Nigel, we are lives. And oddly, there came to him at that moment a new and firm conviction of the nature of love."

"Pascal says that human justice is entirely relative," said Fen, "and that there is no crime which has not at one time or another been considered as a virtuous action. He confuses, of course, the universal moral law with actions valuable through temporary expediency. Even so, I believe incest belies him; it has been universally condemned."

And this shows how disagreeable the murder victim, Yseut, was - "The reaction of the company at large to the news of Yseut's death appeared to be salutary; a sense of relief was plainly discernible, and no one seemed to be at all concerned at the reflection that a murderer might be in their midst. The general feeling was, in fact, that this could hardly be considered as murder, and was on par with such actions as the drowning of superfluous kittens, the painless putting-away of aged dogs, and the necessary destruction of vermin." ...more

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Jun 24, 2018 Paperbackreader rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: british, all-collections, read-but-unowned, classic, mystery, detective, wwii, fay-pub-lib, gervase-fen

Why is The Case of the Gilded Fly considered to be a classic of the Golden Age detective genre? I disliked Crispin's story telling for various reasons. I am only mentioning the main reasons here.
Crispin seems intent on establishing how loathsome the victim is and how great the perpetrator is. I, for one, do not think that he creates characters which establishes those facts. The female characters either lack depth or are terribly stereotypical. One female character never actually gets a name bey ...more

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Jul 08, 2020 Jacqueline Vick added it

I love it when mystery authors incorporate the theater in their books. Ngio Marsh is one of my favorites. Author Edmund Crispin has a flair for the dramatic (literally) in this first mystery featuring eccentric English Lit professor from Oxford, Gervase Fen. Although I'd enjoyed other Gervase Fen mysteries, I hadn't read the first. There were a few character surprises (a wife and kids) but otherwise, this was a typical Fen novel.

When known playwright, Robert Warner, chooses to debut his new pla ...more

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Sep 07, 2017 Frances rated it liked it

Shelves: mystery-series

A fun first mystery novel featuring the eccentric academic detective Gervase Fen, set in Oxford in 1940 and centred around a theatre troupe. One of the cast members is murdered, and Fen assists the police in solving the case. Lots of literary and musical and Oxford references, a fantastical murder method and a varied cast of characters makes for a very fun read.

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Jan 06, 2012 Jane rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I had read some of the reviews on Goodreads prior to reading this and was not sure what to expect. I found it to be witty and clever and very enjoyable. I had to really think about what some words meant but most of the time you can make an educated guess from the context and I don't mind looking words up in the dictionary if I have to. After all it expands your vocabulary. I didn't get the German references but as they were uttered by a bald parrot I didn't think it mattered and it cetainly didn ...more

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