The Torch Burns Bright
Something Old: Fen Country, by Edmund Crispin
Something New:The Night of the Wolf, by Paul Halter
Edmund Crispin was a great admirer of John Dickson Carr. Upon reading Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, he was inspired to write his own detective novel. The Case of The Gilded Fly (Obsequies at Oxford in the US), was published in 1944 while he was an undergraduate at Oxford.
Crispin went on to write eight more exuberant, literate, and clever books, all of them starring a cynical yet whimsical Oxford professor named Gervase Fen, who was partly based on W.E. Moore, and partly on Carr’s detective Dr. Gideon Fell, whose initials he shared.
Crispin was a member of a small group called the Carr Society whose members gathered to create and relate stories in the style of Carr, and his books Swan Song, The Moving Toyshop, and The Case of the Gilded Fly all contain locked room mysteries that Carr would have been proud of. The Moving Toyshop is frequently recommended as his best book, but I recommend either Buried For Pleasure or Love Lies Bleeding, which began life as one of the stories Crispin told at a meeting of the Carr Society. Surely a great pleasure of Crispin’s life must have been the moment when Carr nominated him as a member of the Detection Club, with Agatha Christie seconding.
Crispin was also one of the best writers of detective short stories ever to pound a typewriter, and you should certainly try to get a copy of Fen Country, the posthumously published collection of stories about Fen. The first story in that collection, “Who Killed Baker”, also originated at the Carr Society, but was the idea of another member, Geoffrey Bush, and Crispin wrote the story with Bush as co-author. No one has ever been better than Crispin at writing tight, fair-play detective stories, with every clue hiding in plain sight.
Paul Halter is a great admirer of John Dickson Carr. Upon reading Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, he was inspired to write his own detective novel. The Fourth Door was published in 1987 while the author worked as an engineer in his native France.
Halter has gone on to write many more books since then, mainly about his detectives Alan Twist or Owen Burns, and he sets them all in England in the first half of the 20th Century, because as he says:
“Le Londres du tournant du siècle est le décor idéal pour une histoire policière. Ses maisons de briques rouges, ses policemen, ses Docks, ses ruelles et son brouillard, bref, le monde magique de Dickens ou de Sherlock Holmes.”
Many of his novels are locked room mysteries, but none have been published in English. I have read two in manuscript courtesy of the translator John Pugmire, and though the writing is not quite at the high level of Carr or Crispin, the ideas are brilliant.
Halter is better in the short story form, and here English readers are in luck, for Pugmire and Robert Adey have published Night of the Wolf through Wildside Press. (I wrote a review of it here.) In short, all the stories have clever ideas, and some successfully evoke an unsettling atmosphere of creepiness to complement the strangeness of the puzzles.
Crispin and Carr became friends, and died a year apart, in 1977 and 1978. They both would have been proud to see their torch picked up by Paul Halter and carried into the next century.
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Bonus Bookfling: Another great (and underrated) writer of short detective stories is Bill Pronzini. His collection, Small Felonies, is worth hunting down and can be had for a song.