[Cadogan on poetic inspiration] It’s a curious passive sensation. Some people say it’s as if you’ve noticed something for the first time, but I think it’s more as if the thing in question had noticed you for the first time. [loc. 2580]
Set in Oxford in 1938, this is nominally a detective story -- featuring eccentric professor Gervase Fen and his friend, poet Richard Cadogan -- but relies more on coincidence and humour than on deduction and observation. Cadogan, embarking on a holiday in Oxford, arrives in the city late at night: he spots a shop with its awning still down, finds it unlocked, wanders in and then upstairs, discovers a woman's dead body, and is knocked out by an unseen assailant. When he awakes, the shop that was full of toys the night before now sells groceries ... and there is no corpse on the premises, as Cadogan discovers when he returns with the local constabulary. Luckily, he encounters his old friend Gervase Fen, reckless driver and flamboyant don, and Fen's coterie of intelligent, personable and capable students. (All male.)
Fen and Cadogan discover a web of intrigue centring on an inheritance, a solicitor, and some limericks by Edward Lear. There is a bicycle chase, a spotted dog, some truly irresponsible motoring, and a set-piece finale at a fairground. And there are also some entertainingly erudite conversations (the most unintentionally loathsome characters in literature and the most unreadable books of all time) and lovely vignettes of student life in Oxford (members of the university not permitted to drink in public bars; nude bathing clubs along the river). There are also some nudges of the fourth wall, or its literary equivalent, as when Fen is 'making up titles for Crispin', or comparing events to those in a novel. There isn't much sense of the wider world: little mention of anywhere that isn't Oxford, and nothing beyond Britain. Crispin may have hearkened back to an idyllic past deliberately: this was published in 1946 so likely to have been written during or just after WWII.
As a whodunnit I found it unexceptional, but I very much liked Cadogan and Fen's friendship, and I was surprised to be moved by Cadogan's thoughts on poetry.
Read for the Lockdown Bookclub: there's another Crispin coming ...
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