Gervase Fen #1 – The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) – Edmund Crispin Free Audiobook

Written by Edmund Crispin
Read by Phillip Bird
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 56 Kbps
Unabridged

Yseut Haskell, a pretty but spiteful young actress with a talent for destroying men’s lives, is found dead in a college room just metres from unconventional Oxford don Gervase Fen’s office. The victim is found wearing an unusual ring, a reproduction of a piece in the British Museum featuring a gold gilded fly but does this shed any light on her murder?

As they delve deeper into Yseut’s unhappy life the police soon realise that anyone who knew her would have shot her, but can Fen discover who could have shot her? The Case of the Gilded Fly is the first Gervase Fen mystery and is the perfect introduction to this most idiosyncratic, eccentric and entertaining detective.

Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978)

English crime writer and composer who first became established under his own name as a composer of vocal and choral music but later turned to film work, writing the scores for many British comedies of the 1950s including six for the Carry On series and four for the Doctor series.

He wrote nine detective novels and two collections of short stories under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin. 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. Fen is an eccentric, sometimes absent-minded, character reportedly based on the Oxford professor W. E. Moore. 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 contain frequent references to English literature, poetry, and music. They are also among the few mystery novels to break the fourth wall occasionally and speak directly to the audience. Perhaps the best example is from “The Moving Toyshop”, during a chase sequence – “Let’s go left”, Cadogan suggested. “After all, Gollancz is publishing this book.”

Gareth Roberts has stated that the tone of his Doctor Who novel “The Well-Mannered War” was modelled upon Crispin’s style. He also remarks (of The Moving Toyshop) that “It’s more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who.” Christopher Fowler pays homage to The Moving Toyshop in “The Victoria Vanishes”, his sixth Bryant & May novel. Crispin is considered by many to be one of the last great exponents of the classic crime mystery.

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Original MP3 audio (32kbs@22,050Hz mono) extracted and split into chapters without re-encoding by inAudible 1.75.