The Encluesiast

INTRODUCTION

In this post, I suggested that I would discuss Edmund Crispin’s Fen Country in late August. Well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans…

I’m presenting this collection directly after my review of Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown mysteries because my first impression on reading Fen Country (years ago) was that it was as if the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries had been written for adults by an urbane, academic-minded Brit. And I mean that as praise. This collection is a feast of Golden Age tricks. They fall largely in the same categories as the tricks I surveyed in my last post.

Crispin is easily my favorite author of fair-play short stories. John Dickson Carr wrote my favorite individual story: “The House in Goblin Wood,” which I previously covered here. But Crispin’s body of short stories eclipses Carr’s. And Crispin took to the form far better than some of the authors whom I regard as his superiors as a novelist (including Agatha Christie and Christianna Brand). Two prominent online mystery bloggers— Mike Grost and Jim Noy (at The Invisible Event)—have said the same thing (that Crispin’s short fiction is better than his long fiction), although Grost prefers Crispin’s longer short fiction (collected in Beware of the Trains), whereas Noy prefers the stories currently under review.

As a rule, the titles of my posts include the publication dates of the works being reviewed. In this case, however, the publication date is a bit misleading. Although the collection came out in 1979, after Crispin’s death, the stories themselves were mostly written and published in the 1950s. The fact that they were not originally intended to be collected together may account for some of the repetition of quite unusual premises. More on these shortly.

As anyone who has encountered Crispin’s other works will know, the joy of reading him comes not only from his ingenuity in constructing mysteries, but also from his mastery of tone. Crispin was one of the wittiest prose stylists of his era (counting not only mystery writers but writers in general). Keen readers will note that this surface brightness covers a genuinely dark view of humanity. Crispin does not shrink from the physical unpleasantness of murder. (In one story, “The House by the River,” a strangled woman’s corpse is described as “a stiff and staring thing, a purple-tongued horror.”) His stories in both this collection and Beware of Trains are rife with examples of powerful men grossly abusing their position. Crispin derives clear enjoyment from showing how romantic couples who are brought together by collaborating in a crime are eventually torn apart by mutual distrust. And although Crispin’s main detective, Gervase Fen, may have a frivolous, waggish exterior, he can be positively ruthless in how he deals with criminals. (Perhaps the clearest example of this is in The Moving Toyshop, where Fen effectively waterboards a suspect for information.)

SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

There are 26 cases in Fen Country, 21 of which can be said to be puzzle plot mysteries. 16 of the puzzle-plot mysteries employ one of the four categories that I explained in my Encyclopedia Brown post:

(1) The culprit’s story is contradicted by some (trivia) fact

(2) The incident the culprit claimed to have seen is physically impossible

(3) Although the culprit’s story is physically possible, if it were true, some object would be in a different condition than it is now

(4) The culprit knows something that they shouldn’t or doesn’t know something that they should

In this post, I’ll focus on the stories in the first two categories.

CATEGORY 1

It is difficult to place “The Hunchback Cat” in one specific category, but I’ve placed it here because Fen says “you ought to be aware that it’s only in melodramas and ghost stories that little tortoiseshell cats react violently to the sight of corpses. In real life I’m afraid it isn’t so. For a cat to get into that alarming state there has to be some much livelier stimulus.” I think it’s fair to count this fact about the behavior of cats as trivia. If I have to identify a fault in this story, it’s that Doyle disposed of the cat he used in the frame-up by pushing it through one of the windows. Crispin clearly feels that he has set us up for this with his initial description of the tower as “50 feet high or more, with smooth sheer walls and narrow slits for windows; date about 1450, I should think.” Perhaps it is my ignorance of 15th-century architecture, but I didn’t realize that these narrow slits were necessarily wide enough to admit a cat. A more precise description would have helped.

“The Lion’s Tooth”: This is the most straightforward story in this category and requires little commentary. Sister St. Jude is merely saying the literal English translation of the telltale dandelion.

“The Man Who Lost His Head”: This time the solution is based on a fact one hopes that the reader doesn’t know from firsthand experience—that the police confiscate one’s shoes when throwing one in jail for the night.

“Outrage in Stepney”: The trivia fact is how “Eisenhower” is correctly pronounced in German. This is a fun fact because a little learning might cause someone who knows a bit of German to assume precisely the opposite. I do love the closing lines of this story: “Ike to the rescue! A good thing, in the circumstances, that they didn’t elect Stevenson.”

“Occupational Risk”: One must know the psychological as opposed to musical meaning of fugue. Crispin’s employment of this double meaning in his plot is a little odd. One could imagine a version in which the plot were this: the murdered musician was found with the note that mentions hysterical fugues. The note turns out not to be written by him. Humbleby thinks he is searching for a musician, but Fen points out that it might be (or must be) a psychiatrist instead. 

The actual plot is different, however. In this case, the note actually was written by the musician himself. There is no evidence against the actual murderer (the psychiatrist). So, Fen suggests a trap that he admits has only a one-in-three chance of working. And, of course, this being fiction, the trap works. To the extent that there is a puzzle, then, Crispin has made the puzzle, “What trap could Fen have in mind?”.

“Man Overboard”: The trivia fact here is one entirely unknowable to an American like me—that pubs aren’t open in Wales on Sundays.

CATEGORY 2

There is only one story in this category: “Who Killed Baker?”. I find it slightly unfortunate that this story (which Crispin based on an idea by Geoffrey Bush, son of Christopher Bush) is both the most famous in the collection and the one that is presented first, for while it is certainly clever, it does not present an accurate picture of what Crispin’s fiction is like as a whole. (Mike Grost agrees, writing: “It seems unfortunate that the gimmicky anti-detective story, ‘Who Killed Baker?’ [1950], is probably Crispin’s best known work in the short form.”)

It might seem odd that I have placed this story in Category 2. After all, the characters are not caught out in a lie. Instead, category-two logic is applied to the characters’ (and, likely, reader’s) false assumption rather than to anyone’s direct testimony. Crispin (via Fen) assures us that Mrs. Blaine’s “evidence, for what little it was worth, was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” We therefore know with certainty that she saw a body through a window and was able to discern streaks of blood in its hair. To make it impossible that this corpse is Eckerson’s and not anybody else’s, Crispin needs to establish three things: (a) that the body is poorly lit, (b) that the blood is dark, (c) that only Eckerson has light hair.

Crispin communicates (a) in this sentence, describing Mrs. Blaine finding the body: 

[S]he glanced in at the drawing-room window and saw the gruesome object which lay in shadow on the hearthrug. 

What’s effective here is that the pairing of “gruesome” and “in shadow” can make the latter seem like merely a piece of atmospheric writing, rather than a piece of concrete information meant to serve as a clue. 

For (b), Crispin writes:

The body lay prone on a rug soaked with dark venous blood, and the savage cut which had severed the internal jugular vein had obviously come from behind, and been wholly unexpected. 

Note that Crispin mentions the color of the blood that soaks the rug. He doesn’t directly talk about the blood on the hair. However, since we know that death was due to the severing of the jugular, it must all be venous. This combination means that we are told that the blood is dark at a moment when our visual attention is, so to speak, being directed away from the hair and towards the rug. In other words, it is only by combining this piece of information with the previous one that we can arrive at the image of the dark blood on the hair.

As for (c), Crispin is again rather clever here. Here is his initial description of Baker:

At the time of his death Baker was about forty-five, a self-important little man with very black, heavily brilliantined hair, an incipient paunch, dandified clothes, and a twisted bruiser’s nose which was the consequence not of pugnacity but of a fall from a bicycle in youth.

The fact that his hair is “very black” is introduced earlier but then cast from memory with three more interesting turns of phrase. The next character who is described is Arnold Snow, the chauffeur who becomes Mrs. Baker’s lover. But we are just told that he is “gloomy” and “sallow.” We learn his hair color only when Mrs. Baker is described later as “rather a big woman (though not fat), as dark as her husband or her lover, with a large mouth and eyes, and a Rubensish figure.” Thus, in a single sentence, we are swiftly told that all three have black hair. When it comes time to single out Eckerson as the only person on whose head venous blood would be visible, Crispin avoids any explicit mention of hair, instead merely noting that Eckerson is an albino.

I will cover the stories in Categories 3 and 4 in my next post, drawing connections to other works of fiction and TV that use similar mechanics.