HOLY DISORDERS:
GERVASE FEN — A MAN OF VIGOUROUS INTELLIGENCE

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intelligence. (Samuel Johnson — The Rambler)

In appearance, Gervase Fen first burst from the pages of The Moving Toyshop as a tall, lanky man, aged about forty. His cheerful, lean, ruddy and clean-shaven face was topped with dark hair, plastered down ineffectually with water but still standing in spikes at the crown. Students of crime will recognise that another ‘donnish’ detective, Nigel Strangeways (chronicled by Nicholas Blake) bears a strong superficial similarity to Fen. As did the poet Auden. If DNA samples could only be taken, much might be learned of the mores of intellectual England at about the time of the Boer War.

Fen possessed great energy, walking everywhere with huge strides, while wearing a heavy coat and an extraordinary hat. This hat, or one like it, accompanied him on many of his great cases. Over these cases a more complex person emerges. The Fen of Moving Toyshop is in love with life and with the challenges of crime. He has no time for introspection. Indeed he has little time for anything other than the thrill of the chase. He is unsympathetic; rude (as when he tells the rabbity Mr Sharman his presence is unwanted); callous, (when he has Dr Havering’s head held under water). In many respects he remained gloriously unchanged for the next forty years.

It is true he was moody. He was not without what could be considered vices. He drank a lot of whisky in MT & HD, and still in GM. He was also fond of beer. He smoked a pipe in Swan Song but in virtually every other case he smoked too many cigarettes. He was a cat-owner. And he was politically incorrect, to use the modern term — as when he joined Judy Flecker in admiration of her shapely legs (FH).

Fen was serious about his detecting. By the late 1940’s he had begun to accept it as an addiction. And while it is possible to contend that he initially adopted it as a diversion from his books and ancient poets, perhaps the clearest definition of his motivation came from his own mouth. Faced with the question of whether it would be better not to pursue the murderer of the eminently murderable Edwin Shorthouse, he replied, "On the face of it, yes. But none of us has the right to assess the value of a human creature. All must be held valuable, or none." He points out that the deaths of Christ and Socrates scarcely suggest infallibility in human judgement, and that the Nazis acted on just such judgements. He concluded, "It isn’t a habit I, for one, would like to encourage." (SS)

Perhaps it was the sheer seriousness that this view occasionally demanded of Fen that accounted for his other, transient, interests. Of these, politics (BP) was perhaps the most outré. He told Diana Merrion of his wish to serve the community, but confessed that his recently produced definitive edition of Langland had done strange things to his mind, making him seek a complete change of occupation.

He seemed to enjoy the ability to talk with anyone, from any walk of life, although once, when talking to Myra Herbert in Buried For Pleasure, he did reveal a certain aesthetic snobbery, when he predicted what type of customer would be attracted by Mr Beaver’s planned renovations to the Fish Inn

Curiosity was one of the major driving forces behind Fen’s personality. It was something that never dimmed in him, either when he seemed at an emotional low in Frequent Hearses or when he was in his old age in Glimpses. His attitude to meeting Robert Warner (GF) was just one example of this. He really wanted to find out how Warner worked, how he got inspiration and motivation. Fen was almost fawning on the playwright.

And yet, just to prove his was a many faceted persona, Crispin tells us that Fen was readily distracted by trifles… and had never found in total inactivity the tedium which proverbial wisdom ascribed to it (LD).