I love Glimpses of the Moon - it's gloriously witty and chaotic and utterly implausible, even by Crispin's normal standards!

This was a very fun book. It took me a little while to get into it, but it was worth the trouble. Great characters, good story, lots of laughs. I was very glad to have it on my Kindle. Edmund Crispin uses a lot of archaic language. Having a dictionary at my fingertips was really helpful. I really enjoyed this book and am ready to read it again. My enthusiasm convinced my husband to read it. I'll be glad to have someone to share it with. Thank you to NetGalley for introducing me to this delightful book.

The Glimpses of the Moon, a Net Galley ebook, is a quirky, amusing, and literary mystery full of allusions and comical characters, set in rural Devon. A delightful satire.

The novel is something of a parody, and the characters are more important than the murders. Professor Gervase Fen is writing a book on the post-modern novel while staying in the house of vacationing friends in the Devon countryside and finds the original murder of a character named Routh uninteresting, although his friends and neighbors are fascinated. Since Routh's head is missing, I can better understand the friends' reaction than Fen's!

The mystery, the murders are convoluted and the curiosity about who killed whom and how and why is a source of conversation and curiosity for the Major and the Rector (oh, I love both of these characters), and the visiting journalist. The spinster sisters Titty and Tatty who display their "Botticelli" at the annual fete and share a hearing aid, the hypochondriac composer (who composes music for horror films), the local pig farmer with the belligerent German giantess for a wife, the owner of the local hostelry who never leaves his bed, and other characters who are droll, daft, and full of idiosyncrasies kept me intrigued and chuckling.

Stripey the cat:
"Stripey slumbered on, resting his gonads so as to be fit for another public-spirited bout of propagation when darkness fell."Stripey the cat:
"...Stripey the cat had absented himself on one of his priapic itineraries."The Rector:
"I don't approve of speaking ill of people," the Rector said. "On the other hand, if you didn't speak ill of Routh, you'd never be able to mention him at all." Fen working on his book on the post-modern novel:
"Edna O'Brien," he muttered, "is the Cassandra of female eroticism." Certainly Edna O'Brien's women didn't seem to get much fun out of sex. If he were they, he would give it up altogether."Most of the best quotes were too long and can't effectively be taken out of context. The novel is NOT fast-paced, but I found it a genuine pleasure and will be looking for more of Edmund Crispin's witty work.

About the Author
Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (usually credited as 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. 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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition. (from Amazon site.Mystery. Originally published in 1978; republished by Bloomsbury, 2011.

 

I lean more towards hard-boiled crime than cozy mysteries, but occasionally, I need a change of pace. The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin is a cozy mystery with all the hallmark features: an amateur sleuth, murder in a bucolic village setting, and most of the violence off the page. In common with many cozies, The Glimpses of the Moon is also quite funny, and it’s no easy feat to mesh humour with murder, but author Edmund Crispin (1921-1978), whose real name was Robert Bruce Montgomery, manages to blend the two elements very neatly in a novel that is full of memorable scenes and characters. While many of the characters are caricatures–the types we’d expect to find in a dull, sleepy British village, others give the novel a unique flavor.

In The Glimpses of the Moon, Crispin’s series sleuth, Oxford don, Gervase Fen, on a sabbatical, rents a country cottage in Aller hamlet with the idea that the peaceful country life will be conducive to his research into “the post-war British novel.” The novel opens with Gervase enjoying a pint at the pub with one of the locals, the Major, when they are interrupted by a journalist named Padmore who is sniffing around, asking questions about a murder that took place two months earlier. Padmore, a bit of a rum character who has little experience covering crime, has written an almost-finished book on the murder of a local man, the very unsavoury and much disliked Routh, generally agreed to be a “horrible man.” beheaded by eccentric “mad as a hatter” loner Hagberd. While no one regrets Routh’s passing, there seems only to be speculation that it took this long for someone to finally kill this obnoxious and cruel man. The solution to the crime is apparently sewn up, and the police are satisfied that they’ve caught the killer. Much to Padmore’s dismay however, he discovers from the semi-lucid Gobbo (the modern-day equivalent to the village idiot), that Hagberd couldn’t have possibly killed Routh as Hagberd was chatting with Gobbo at the time of the murder.

Since this startling revelation occurs in the presence of both the major and Gervase Fen, the men initially try to establish whether or not Gobbo–hardly the most reliable man in the village–is correct or not. But a few casual interviews  only seem to cloud the matter, and then another headless corpse appears … horror of horrors… at the village fete!

The plot is loaded with colourful characters. Apart from Gobbo, there’s cleaner Mrs Bragg, “a big henna-ed woman who shrieked with happy laughter,” the very snobby Mrs Leeper-Foxe whose late husband left her a “fat income from factory farming,” an unworldly eccentric Rector who lives in a “huge, lowering mid-Victorian erection” called Y Wurry , and Ortrud, a sturdy, tireless German nymphomaniac who brings her lovers back as temporary lodgers to her husband’s pig farm. He, in the meantime, consoles himself with his pigs who appear to be named after heroines in Thomas Hardy novels.

An Amazonian woman almost as tall as her husband, she had great physical strength and an emphatic Junoesque figure. (“Those bosoms, don’t you know,” the Major had once pronounced, more in amazement than in admiration. “Prodigious things–dazzling-flesh-bulbs.”) Her inexpressive Nordic head combined dark eyebrows with cheese-coloured hair put together in a complicated bun at the back, like pallid worms transfixed in mid-orgy.

Until recently, Ortrud wasn’t the only man-eater in town. Local lass, Mavis Trent also had a reputation for taking lovers and dropping them, but she was found dead under somewhat strange circumstances. Is there a connection between the death of Mavis Trent and the murder of Routh? Here’s the Rector on the subject of Mavis–a woman he’s obviously thought about quite a bit:

“Mavis was a nympho, I suppose, but calling her that gives a wrong impression. She never seemed to flirt or ogle or any of that stuff. But then, she didn’t have to, or anyway, not obviously; she was just naturally cheerfully sexy, with a sort of built-in spontaneous come-hither which gave you the idea, very powerfully, that making love to her would be all fun and no complications. It was, too–or so I gather. Damn it, I was quite taken with the girl myself. Not that I’d have married her, of course (she didn’t seem interested in making a second marriage, come to that), and of course, me being a cleric and not approving of all this promiscuity anyway, there was no question of an affaire (besides you can’t stay properly fit if you keep fornicating all the time). Even so, I still got the impression that she wouldn’t have minded nabbing me, on a temporary basis,” said the Rector, with obvious gratification. “So you can see, she wasn’t what you’d call choosy.”

Edmund Crispin’s characters are a motley bunch who mingle due to proximity and yet while they all seem to inhabit their own little worlds,  they collide on a number of issues: animal cruelty (which seems an appropriate issue since the story is set in the countryside) and sexuality. It’s as though unleashed in the countryside, people in and around the village of Burraford have resorted to their animalistic natures and all social rules are ignored–not by everyone, of course, but this ‘rule breaking’ seems to have led to murder and Gervase becomes embroiled in the hunt for the killer while trying to write his book and care for all the animals that reside at the cottage he rents. One of the complaints I read about Crispin’s work is that some readers found his allusions a bit tedious. In The Glimpses of the Moon, Gervase Fen is constantly rattling off names of authors (muttering to himself), but I enjoyed these intrusions. On a note of caution, however, foreign readers may find the small patches of dialect impenetrable.

Review copy

 

Gervase Fen, one of my fictional heros! How wonderful to see him back! I have old Penguin editions of all these books in storage, and was delighted to find that they are being re-issued by Bloomsbury. While this is not my favorite Fen, it does include The Pisser, which has always been my preferred term for utility poles since I first read the books decades ago.

Lots of formatting issues in this Kindle version, which were hopefully rectified when it was published. For example, 'Pad-more' at location 84, "belowand" at location 1801, 'careering' at location 4174 presumably was supposed to be careening, and wrong quotation marks (location 1937). If not, there will be plenty of complaints from Kindle purchasers.

The story, of course, is classic Fen--erudite, funny, and quirky. I've already recommended this to one British lit lover who's now a converted FenFan. Please do a good job marketing these, so they don't go out of print again for another 20 years, like last time.

 Set in a Devon village, this is a quirky romp, starring amateur sleuth Gervase Fen. First published in 1977, it has the feel of a 'Golden Age' crime novel. A bit too fond of polysyllables for my taste but with some very funny set pieces, it celebrates the eccentricities of the English countryside. Or, to quote the Major: "everyone who lives in the countryside's a bit touched, one way or another. If we all started trying to have each other certified there'd be nobody left."  
 Indeed.

I received a copy of "The Glimpses of the Moon" by Edmund Crispin from Bloomsbury Reader via Netgalley.

I chose this book because I had just read the first (and my first) Gervase Fen mystery "The Case of the Gilded Fly" and thought Fen would be an interesting detective to follow. I knew that this book was somewhat later in the series, but didn't check until I was already half-way through it than it had been written in the 1970s. The contemporaneous references here were to subjects I knew about such as Perry Mason and the pro-animal/anti-hunting movement.

Even though the characters are discussing a recent murder from the first page of the book, the facts do not come out for quite a while. Professor Fen is surrounded by a cast of the most hilarious characters ever found in a mystery novel to the point where the story becomes a farce. Although the the situation comedy is so beautifully described that you can almost see it happening in front of you, it really plays no role in solving the crime.

So as a lovely piece of humorous fiction, this book is great; as a detective novel, not so much.