posted on 01 May 2016

Love Lies Bleeding by Edmund Crispin

When I first encountered the novels of Edmund Crispin I just couldn't get enough of them. They seemed to me to be a perfect confection for slow, lazy summer days - something that combined the golden age of British crime writing with a kind of knowing, literary joke that included the reader in the enterprise.

And Edmund Crispin was the perfect author to create these little masterpieces.  Born in 1928, his real name was Bruce Montgomery  and his first love was musical composition - from which he earned a decent living. He was, in fact, the composer of several of the early Carry On theme tunes and the Doctor in the House series of movies.

Montgomery / Crispin moved in the literary circles of Oxford and was friendly with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin - who apparently considered him to be incorrigibly lazy. He did, however, manage to produce eight novels and two or three short story collections before he died in 1978 from heart disease exacerbated by his fondness for drink.

Crispin's amateur sleuth - every author of the period had to have one - is the louche English academic, Gervase Fen, who blends the deadly serious with the near farcical and mixes in a good lashing of literary quotations and allusions.

Love Lies Bleeding was his fourth novel written in 1948 and it has all the usual characteristics of a Crispin classic - a literary sub-plot, brutal murders, eccentric English characters, very dim police chiefs and a plot so complex and convoluted that it feels like untying a knot.

Set in a public school just outside Stratford Upon Avon, the plot revolves around the supposed discovery of the manuscript of the lost Shakespeare play, Love Labours Won, and the sordid double-crosses that accompany it. Clearly I'm not going to tell you much about the plot because it’s pretty much all about the plot - you might call the characterisation a bit thin.

Somehow Crispin’s writing always evokes summer days and there is a lightness about his work that often seems to collide with the murderous actions of the criminals – shootings, hostages, peril in dark woods and near death experiences never quite blot out the smell of fresh cut grass, the sound of leather on willow and the smiles of pretty girls (Fen’s appreciation of  schoolgirls might draw some frowns in the current context of child safety).

This is a guaranteed read for a lazy day – if you have that sort of mind you’ll also very much enjoy spotting all the literary references but, if not, just enjoy the thoroughly good-natured romp much in the same way as you might tune into an episode of Midsomer Murders.

 

Terry Potter

April 2016