Frequent Hearses

Description

Stars, Starlets, Floozies and factotums to the film world - Gervase Fen suspects them all... The young actress, Gloria Scott, drowns after throwing herself off Waterloo Bridge. The news sends shock-waves around her film studio where Gervase Fen, Oxford Don and amateur criminologist, just so happens to be working. With help from friend the Inspector Humbleby, the tragic loss of young life leads them to many more dark places. Young Ms. Scott's apartment has been searched, and all signs of her real identity have been removed, and what's more, minutes before Humbleby interrogates her co-workers, one of them, a lecherous cameraman, is poisoned. Equal parts compelling, witty and ingenuous, this novel is a classic example of great British detective fiction. First published in 1950, Frequent Hearses was Edmund Crispin's seventh novel.

Edmund Crispin (2 October 1921 - 15 September 1978) was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (usually credited as Bruce Montgomery), 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.