Death of a starlet…

When a young actress going by the stage name of Gloria Scott throws herself off Waterloo Bridge one night, it is clearly suicide. But why then has someone stripped her apartment of anything that might reveal her true identity? And what drove her to kill herself so suddenly, on her way home from a party where she had apparently been enjoying herself? She had been working on a film being made by the Leiper studios in London, and so it’s to there that Detective Inspector Humbleby heads to begin his investigation. On the way he meets an old friend, Gervase Fen, academic and amateur detective, who coincidentally is also heading to the studios where he’s working as a consultant on a film about Alexander Pope. Humbleby promptly decides to rope Fen into the investigation, and Fen is quite willing to be roped.

It tuns out that Gloria had been pregnant when she died, and more than one man in the studios is rumoured to be the father. There’s Stuart North, heartthrob actor, who had recently been paying Gloria attention much to the annoyance of glamorous star, Madge Crane, who has set her own sights on North. Or could the father be one of Madge Crane’s brothers – perhaps Maurice, a camera-man, or Nicholas, a director, or even David, who does something not very important in the Script Department? Or could it be someone else entirely that the rumour-mongers don’t know about? But again, even assuming the father, whoever he might be, had somehow driven Gloria to kill herself, that doesn’t explain why anyone has gone to considerable lengths to hide her identity. It’s going to be up to Gervase Fenn to fathom out the reason, but before he does a murderer is going to strike…

There’s a real mix in this one of the darkness of the plot blended with a lot of humour, especially in the backchat between Humbleby and Fen, that keeps the overall tone light. There’s also a wonderful tense thrillery bit at the end complete with woman in peril that is very effectively done. While there’s a fair amount of sexism in the style of judging women by the shape of their legs and so on, the story also gives room for showing how aspiring young actresses can fall prey to the men with power in the industry. There’s also a strong female character who has both brains and courage, and who redeemed Crispin in my eyes for some of the less flattering portraits of the “dumb blonde” type of actress.

Crispin is one of the “erudite” style of Golden Age authors, who like to show off their Oxbridge educations by dropping in literary and classical allusions and occasional Latin tags. Normally this annoys me enormously since it’s usually done to show off the author's superiority to his or her readers, but my limited acquaintance with Crispin has so far made me feel he does it rather tongue-in-cheek, if anything rather mocking the ones who do it for real. I may be giving him undue credit, but for whatever reason, I find it amusing rather than annoying when he does it. In the same way, he frequently uses ridiculously obscure words, necessitating regular reference to a dictionary, but it feels to me that he does this with a knowing wink, as a kind of game he’s playing with the reader. However, I can easily see that for some people this could generate the same kind of allergic reaction I have to, say, Dorothy L. Sayers or Michael Innes, who also play the I-am-so-superior game but without the humour that dilutes the insufferability.

Gloria is a complex victim – she had been ambitious, with the hard-edged self-centredness that is almost a requirement for success in such a competitive environment. And yet her youth and inexperience perhaps meant that she hadn’t yet learned just how unscrupulously the people around her in the film industry might behave. She is hard to like, and yet impossible not to feel some sympathy for. The plot is good and definitely fair play, although I came nowhere near the solution and had to go back through to check if the clues had really been there – they had!

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this one, finding it highly entertaining. It’s only my second Edmund Crispin – I loved the other one, The Moving Toyshop, just as much, and am looking forward to reading more of his books soon.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Collins Crime Club.

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Another great installment.

I skipped the last due to too much psychiatry - thankfully, the mental health theorising was more limited in this book and mostly plausible

Oxford Don and amateur detective Gervase Fen is lending his expertise on Alexander Pope to a film studio and gets involved in another case of murder. A fun look at post WW2 film studios in England though the actual plot was a bit contrived. Listened to the audio version which was very well narrated by Philip Bird.

I love Edmund Crispin's books. I was rather surprised when I learned a few years back that he was a composer - but that is all beside the point.
The title for this book comes from a poem of Pope's. Fen is a literary consultant for a movie being made about Pope and his supposed relationship with a young woman who committed suicide. As he is walking to the studio from the nearby town he is accosted by the Scotland Yard inspector for directions to the studio. The inspector doesn't recognize him at first because he has is reading a book by Henry James as he walks. The inspector has come because someone from the studio phoned him and told him they recognized the picture of a girl who had committed suicide. Fen helps him to find Judy at the studio to learn about the girl who went by Gloria Scott. When the police went to her apartment, they found everything with her name on it removed. Why did no one want them to know who the girl was?

A Fen mystery that doesn't feature that much of Fen - and a mystery with a resolution that elicits a hearty "Wait... who now?". But for all that it's still very enjoyable, as most of Edmund Crispin's work is.