Frequent Hearses; A Detective Story: A Detective Story (A London House & Maxwell Mystery)

Rating:
Summary: The best of the Golden Age of British mystery
Review: If I had to rank my favorite British mystery authors who produced their best work in the 1930s through the 1950s, my list would look like this:

(1) Edmund Crispin a.k.a. Bruce Montgomery (2) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (3) Dorothy Sayers (4) Margery Allingham (5) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (with a drop in rank for his mysteries that went off the surreal deep-end).

Out of my Fab Four Brits, Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin share the most similarities. They were both of Scots-Irish background, both wrote their mysteries under pseudonyms while teaching at college, and both were educated at Oxford -- Oriel College and St. John's College, respectively. They both wrote highly literate mysteries with frequent allusions to the classics (nine out of ten of which go zooming right over my head). Michael Innes has his detective, Sir John Appleby poke fun at this high-brow type of murder fiction in "Death at the Chase":

"That's why detective stories are of no interest to policemen. Their villains remain far too consistently cerebral."

Expect that even the most vicious murderer in an Edmund Crispin mystery will quote Dryden or Shakespeare at the drop of a garrote. "Frequent Hearses" is a fertile setting for this type of classical badinage, since its plot involves the making of a film based on the biography of Alexander Pope. Gervase Fen, Oxford don of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire is hired by the film company as a story consultant, and he is plagued throughout the book by a Scotland Yard detective who is an amateur classics scholar. Fen wants to discuss the murder. Chief Inspector Humbleby wants to talk about the Brontes and Dr. Johnson. Neither one will admit to a less than perfect understanding of either his profession or his hobby, and both despise amateurs. Their encounters keep "Frequent Hearses" sparkling along right up until its final page. Here is a sample of dialogue, wherein Inspector Humbleby deliberately misunderstands Fen's explanation of the film's subject:

"Based," Fen reiterated irritably, "on the life of Pope."

"The Pope?"

"Pope."

"Now which Pope would that be, I wonder?" said Humbleby, with the air of one who tries to take an intelligent interest in what is going forward. "Pius, or Clement, or--"

Fen stared at him. "Alexander, of course."

"You mean"---Humbleby spoke with something of an effort---"you mean the Borgia?"

All of Crispin's characters are carefully (one might say 'crisply') developed, and distinguished for the reader by a quirk or eccentric manner of speech (sometimes Crispin overplays the eccentricity at the expense of realism, especially with his main protagonist-- I do wish Fen would stop expostulating, "Oh, my fur and whiskers!"). Physical description is sketchy. If one of Crispin's characters walked past you in the street, you probably wouldn't recognize him. However, if you were to overhear his conversation with the postman---

And I don't mean to imply that "Frequent Hearses" is all dialogue and no action. There is one especially harrowing scene where a young woman chases the murderer into a maze in order to learn his identity and then (when reason returns) can't find her way back out again. By the time Fen rescues her, she has endured an experience right out of an M.R. James horror story (in fact, the young woman quotes M.R. James at length while she is traversing the maze - a typical Crispin characteristic).

The mystery surrounding the murderer's identity and motivation is as cleverly convoluted as the maze, and it is equally as hard to get to its heart. Crispin himself wrote and published at least one film script and composed music for several films, so "Frequent Hearses" is told with the knowledge of a movie industry insider.

If you like vintage British mysteries with a 'classical education' and haven't yet discovered the 'Professor Fen' novels, then you're in for a treat-- assuming you can find these out-of-print volumes. Here are all nine of the Fen mysteries plus two collections of short stories, in case you jump into 'Frequent Hearses' and want to keep going:

"The Case of the Gilded Fly" ("Obsequies at Oxford"), 1944; "Holy Disorders", 1945; "The Moving Toyshop", 1946; "Swan Song" ("Dead and Dumb"), 1947; "Love Lies Bleeding", 1948; "Buried for Pleasure", 1948; "Frequent Hearses", 1950; "The Long Divorce", 1952; "Beware of the Trains", 1953 (short stories); "The Glimpses of the Moon", 1978; "Fen Country", 1979 (short stories).

Rating:
Summary: The best of the Golden Age of British mystery
Review: If I had to rank my favorite British mystery authors who produced their best work in the 1930s through the 1950s, my list would look like this:

(1) Edmund Crispin a.k.a. Bruce Montgomery (2) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (3) Dorothy Sayers (4) Margery Allingham (5) Michael Innes a.k.a. John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (with a drop in rank for his mysteries that went off the surreal deep-end).

Out of my Fab Four Brits, Michael Innes and Edmund Crispin share the most similarities. They were both of Scots-Irish background, both wrote their mysteries under pseudonyms while teaching at college, and both were educated at Oxford -- Oriel College and St. John's College, respectively. They both wrote highly literate mysteries with frequent allusions to the classics (nine out of ten of which go zooming right over my head). Michael Innes has his detective, Sir John Appleby poke fun at this high-brow type of murder fiction in "Death at the Chase":

"That's why detective stories are of no interest to policemen. Their villains remain far too consistently cerebral."

Expect that even the most vicious murderer in an Edmund Crispin mystery will quote Dryden or Shakespeare at the drop of a garrote. "Frequent Hearses" is a fertile setting for this type of classical badinage, since its plot involves the making of a film based on the biography of Alexander Pope. Gervase Fen, Oxford don of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire is hired by the film company as a story consultant, and he is plagued throughout the book by a Scotland Yard detective who is an amateur classics scholar. Fen wants to discuss the murder. Chief Inspector Humbleby wants to talk about the Brontes and Dr. Johnson. Neither one will admit to a less than perfect understanding of either his profession or his hobby, and both despise amateurs. Their encounters keep "Frequent Hearses" sparkling along right up until its final page. Here is a sample of dialogue, wherein Inspector Humbleby deliberately misunderstands Fen's explanation of the film's subject:

"Based," Fen reiterated irritably, "on the life of Pope."

"The Pope?"

"Pope."

"Now which Pope would that be, I wonder?" said Humbleby, with the air of one who tries to take an intelligent interest in what is going forward. "Pius, or Clement, or--"

Fen stared at him. "Alexander, of course."

"You mean"---Humbleby spoke with something of an effort---"you mean the Borgia?"

All of Crispin's characters are carefully (one might say 'crisply') developed, and distinguished for the reader by a quirk or eccentric manner of speech (sometimes Crispin overplays the eccentricity at the expense of realism, especially with his main protagonist-- I do wish Fen would stop expostulating, "Oh, my fur and whiskers!"). Physical description is sketchy. If one of Crispin's characters walked past you in the street, you probably wouldn't recognize him. However, if you were to overhear his conversation with the postman---

And I don't mean to imply that "Frequent Hearses" is all dialogue and no action. There is one especially harrowing scene where a young woman chases the murderer into a maze in order to learn his identity and then (when reason returns) can't find her way back out again. By the time Fen rescues her, she has endured an experience right out of an M.R. James horror story (in fact, the young woman quotes M.R. James at length while she is traversing the maze - a typical Crispin characteristic).

The mystery surrounding the murderer's identity and motivation is as cleverly convoluted as the maze, and it is equally as hard to get to its heart. Crispin himself wrote and published at least one film script and composed music for several films, so "Frequent Hearses" is told with the knowledge of a movie industry insider.

If you like vintage British mysteries with a 'classical education' and haven't yet discovered the 'Professor Fen' novels, then you're in for a treat-- assuming you can find these out-of-print volumes. Here are all nine of the Fen mysteries plus two collections of short stories, in case you jump into 'Frequent Hearses' and want to keep going:

"The Case of the Gilded Fly" ("Obsequies at Oxford"), 1944; "Holy Disorders", 1945; "The Moving Toyshop", 1946; "Swan Song" ("Dead and Dumb"), 1947; "Love Lies Bleeding", 1948; "Buried for Pleasure", 1948; "Frequent Hearses", 1950; "The Long Divorce", 1952; "Beware of the Trains", 1953 (short stories); "The Glimpses of the Moon", 1978; "Fen Country", 1979 (short stories).

Rating:
Summary: A clever spoof of biopics
Review: This was the one where Fen is hired as a consultant on a British film biopic, the life of Pope, here called "The Unfortunate Lady," and while doing so he stumbles into the case of Gloria Scott. No, not the famous Sherlock Holmes story--oddly no one notices that the poor starlet has taken her screen name from Conan Doyle--in this story Gloria Scott is a shrewish, ambitious, obsessed young woman who resembles Eve in ALL ABOUT EVE, only she comes to an end worse than that endured by Eve and eventually Fen and others realize that, bad as she was, she didn't deserve the rough treatment dealt to her by this one family prominent in UK films--a screenwriter, a leading lady, a director, all brothers and sisters, all of them poisonous, and each one then dealt a blow of revenge by someone who, or so it seems, seeks to avenge himself for the way the unfortunate Gloria Scott ended up--throwing herself from a bridge in full view of dozens of people, including apparently the murderer. The film studio seemed like it was based on Gainsborough Pictures, and the kind of movie they were making could have starred Dirk Bogarde, James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, and that these were the stars who made walkthroughs into the plot of FREQUENT HEARSES (changed a bit due to libel laws).

It is a very grim story, and the little bits of humor that surround it don't fit in especially well with the downbeat storyline. I felt that Crispin was trying very hard to make a satire on the way that film biographies frequently depart quite far from the realities of the life of the person they're supposedly attempting to capture, and then there was this other sort of Zola story of Gloria Scott, and the two elements of the story never really matched up for me. But that's my personal view and others may admire Crispin's indisputable urbanity and cleverness.