The detective Gervase Fen and his creator ‘Edmund Crispin’ were born (or, to be more accurate, conceived) sometime in April 1942, when a twenty-one-year-old Oxford undergraduate named Robert Bruce Montgomery was arguing about books over a congenial pint at a pub. His friend, the actor John Maxwell, was astonished that Montgomery had not read the detective stories of John Dickson Carr, famous as the creator of Dr Gideon Fell and master of locked-room mysteries and seemingly impossible crimes. Montgomery later recalled that in those days he was ‘a prig and an intellectual snob,’ but he agreed to read Carr’s shuddery novel of witch cults and rational detection, The Crooked Hinge. ‘I went to bed with it not expecting very much,’ Montgomery said. ‘But at two o’clock in the morning I was still sitting up with my eyes popping out of their sockets at the end of one of the sections—I think the third [actually it was the second]—with the doctor looking after the nerve-racked maid, saying, “You devil up there, what have you done?” And of course I finished the book that night. It was to be the seminal moment in my career, and to alter it entirely, for although subsequently I read and enjoyed other detective-story writers, in particular Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell, it was Carr primarily who induced me to try my hand at one myself, thus creating Edmund Crispin.’
Top Posts & Pages
Liddell’s Ghost
Click image to read my short story, 'Liddell’s Ghost' in Cygnus, the Journal of Speculative Fiction.
Changed
Click image to read my short story 'Changed' in The Cynic Online Magazine.
First Date
Click image to read my short story 'First Date' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
Ghost Walk
Click image to read my short story 'Ghost Walk' in Aphelion, the Webzine of sci-fi and fantasy.
M R James
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Ghosts of Christmas Past
‘There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas,’ wrote Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to his darkly comic collection Told After Supper (1891), ‘something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails’. Dickens would no doubt agree, […]
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M R James’s Suffolk
The macabre beneath the landscape is not dispelled by nearness to the sea. What Henry James knew, and described in English Hours (1905) – the strangeness present on a flattened seashore – M R James (no blood relation, although the two were acquainted) expressed in two of his best-known ghost stories: Oh, Whistle, and I’ll […]
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A Warning to the Curious
Here’s a real festive treat. In 2000 the BBC produced a series called Ghost Stories for Christmas, with Christopher Lee in which Lee played M R James reading four of his own stories. Lee, who actually once met James, obviously enjoyed making this series and A Warning to the Curious is a real highlight – enjoy!
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Lost Hearts
I have been haunted by the writings of M R James since childhood but when asked what is my favourite of all his ghostly tales I’ve never fully been able to answer. Lost Hearts, an early tale which apparently James didn’t much care for, and which only appeared in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to […]
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A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Tractate Middoth
Here’s a real treat to conclude the series of Christmas ghost stories that I’ve been posting for the last few weeks – the BBC adaptation of The Tractate Middoth from just a couple of years ago. Fingers crossed they do another one this year!
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Ghost Cities 