Swan Song (A Gervase Fen Mystery) - Softcover

Crispin, Edmund

3.89

1,390 ratings by Goodreads

9781542393232: Swan Song (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 154239323X ISBN 13: 9781542393232

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017

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When an opera company gathers in Oxford for the first post-war production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger its happiness is soon soured by the discovery that the unpleasant Edwin Shorthouse will be singing a leading role. Nearly everyone involved has reason to loathe Shorthouse but who amongst them has the fiendish ingenuity to kill him in his own locked dressing room? In the course of this entertaining adventure, eccentric Oxford don and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen has to unravel two murders, cope with the unpredictability of the artistic temperament, and attempt to encourage the course of true love. “A splendidly intricate and superior locked-room mystery.” – New York Times

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About the Author:

Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (2 October 1921 – 15 September 1978), an English crime writer and composer. Montgomery wrote nine detective novels and two collections of short stories under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin (taken from a character in Michael Innes’s Hamlet, Revenge!). The stories feature Oxford don Gervase Fen, who is a Professor of English at the University and a fellow of St Christopher’s College, a fictional institution that Crispin locates next to St John’s College. The whodunit novels have complex plots and fantastic, somewhat unbelievable solutions, including examples of the locked room mystery. They are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style and they are also among the few mystery novels to break the fourth wall occasionally and speak directly to the audience.

Review:

"A splendidly intricate and superior locked-room mystery" --New York Times

"One of the last exponents of the classical English detective story...elegant, literate, and funny" --The Times of London

"On of the most literate mystery writers of the 20th century" --Boston Globe

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