The Long Divorce (Gervase Fen Mysteries) [Paperback]

Edmund Crispin is not known as a writer who features animals in his mysteries. Yet in "Swan Song," he gave us the bald, pub parrot that recited Heine in the original German.

In "Love Lies Bleeding," Mr. Merrythought, the ancient, slovenly bloodhound thwarted a double murder.

"The Long Divorce" introduces Lavender, the cat who sees Martians. (Either you have a cat who sees Martians---there is one perched on my printer right now, staring off into what humans refer to as `empty space'---or else you will have to take Mr. Crispin's word that such perceptive cats exist.) Lavender, the marmalade-colored tomcat with unusual visual powers is instrumental in the capture of a murderer.

Murder is really secondary to the story of a village plagued by an anonymous letter-writer. Some of the letters are merely obscene. Others are poisonously factual.

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford is importuned by an old friend to expose the anonymous letter-writer. And so Fen, microscopically disguised under the name of `Mr. Datchery' (borrowed from Charles Dickens's "The Mystery of Edmund Drood") takes himself off to his friend's bucolic village.

"To an obbligato of bird-song Mr Datchery marched beneath a bright sky towards Cotton Abbas. And he carolled lustily, to the distress of all animate nature, as he walked....The directions given him at Twelford had been explicit. But since he believed himself to possess an infallible bump of locality, he was soon tempted to modify them with a variety of short cuts, and after about three miles he discovered, much to his indignation, that he was lost."

Is that or is that not Fen to the life?

"The Long Divorce" (1952) is eighth in Crispin's series of mysteries starring his literate, cynical, sometimes bumptious amateur detective. It is also a comedy of rural, post-war England. The characters are dead-on: the army veteran who is trying to stop smoking; the female physician who is struggling to build a practice in a conservative backwater; the teenager who both loves and is ashamed of her obnoxious, money-grubbing father.

Many of the mystery writers of the 1940s and 1950s were guilty of creating one-dimensional female stereotypes, or going off on the occasional anti-feminist rant. Margery Allingham, Rex Stout, and John Dickson Carr come readily to mind as producing examples of this type of writing. Crispin also creates the occasional stereotype, especially in his early novels and some of his short stories, but the characters in "The Long Divorce" are fully and fascinatingly realized---especially the women (okay, okay---except for the innkeeper's wife and the sluttish barmaid. But they are very minor players).

Crispin also works in an ongoing and thoughtful dialogue on suicide, and there is a hair-raising scene where Fen just manages to prevent a young girl from killing herself.

"The Long Divorce" is a classical Golden-Age British mystery, a thoughtful essay on suicide, and a marvelous, occasionally hilarious study of the rural English character. I feel the same frustration that Fen felt, when at story's end he reveals his true name to a gathering of the book's characters---and very few of them have heard of him.

Why isn't Fen at least as well-known as Lord Peter or Miss Marple or Nero Wolfe? He certainly deserves to be.

I thought this was one of Edmund Crispin's best books. It was, as usual, well written, erudite, and witty, as well as having an interesting and surprising plot.

I really enjoyed this mystery. Before I came across the author's name in another murder mystery series (Agatha Raisin by M. C. Beaton) I had not ever heard of the author--and I thought I'd read pretty nearly all of the early authors.

The writing style may not appeal to all readers, as sentence structure is much more complex and elaborate and the vocabulary exquisite. It will probably take a little getting used to for anyone saturated with less prosy works where dialogue is almost all there is. Those fond of the Maisey Dobbs series, Maisie Dobbs (Book 1), by Jacqueline Winspear and the Reavley Family series, Shoulder the Sky: A Novel (World War I), by Anne Perry will find this author more approachable on first acquaintance.

Despite its copyright date, the mystery is a well plotted, traditional example of the classic genre. Events occur in a small, rather closed English rural community, with the usual types of characters slightly updated for the mid-20th century (1950). The modern police procedural is followed as far as it is possible for the times, but as with the mysteries of the 1920s and 1930s (as indeed back to Conan Doyle and Edger Allen Poe), it is the unique and intuitive master detective who solves the crime. Clues are disbursed with great care and can easily be missed, but by "the drawing-room finale" when the suspects are brought together, these become more obvious as the Master Detective recites his conclusions and how he arrived at them. If you're an old hand at mysteries, especially the classic type, you'll probably have gotten there already yourself.

Some of the action is not entirely plausible, but where this is the case, it is activity having little or nothing to do with the actual mystery and adds greatly to the excitement of the case. I enjoyed all the characters, even the more obnoxious ones, but especially the cat Lavender. His antics with the Martians are rather cute. In general the levity of the entire book was enjoyable, especially the narrator's (the story is in the omniscient) rather cogent observations about the characters of the characters.

An enjoyable introduction to the series, I'll probably read more of them.