HOLY DISORDERS:
AGE HATH NOT WITHERED HIM — MUCH

His attitude to Brenda Boyce and Elspeth Murdoch in LLB was surely paternalistic. Later, in FH, Crispin tells us that Fen felt advancing years evoked in him emotions of a discouragingly paternal and moralising sort. This, at great variance to his attitude to his colleagues and others, was surely a sign of ageing. Fen himself said as much: "As I get older, I get less resilient and more predictable. It depresses me sometimes." That said, he could still summon up flashes of his magnificent irreverent rudeness, as Inspector Gregson (FH) found out.

In Love Lies Bleeding, Fen admitted to Daphne Savage that he had sobered up in the ten years since Moving Toyshop, and become nostalgic. Indeed, throughout this story, unless we assume that Crispin censored it for obscure reasons, Fen is rarely rude, or effervescent or impatient. It all supports his claim of greater sobriety.

It is thus all the more reassuring to find that in June 1950, three years further on, Mr Datchery (into whom Fen has temporarily metamorphosed) charges through the countryside, carolling lustily, to the distress of all animate nature (The Long Divorce).