BURIED FOR PLEASURE:
TREASONS, STRATEGEMS AND PIGS
In June 1947, Fen was invited by his friend, Dr Stamford, Headmaster of Castrevenford School, to present the prizes at their annual ceremony. Crispin documented the case as Love Lies Bleeding. Inevitably, given Fen's presence, two of the Stamford’s schoolmasters are murdered. Fen himself states The Moving Toyshop affair was almost ten years before and, upon meeting Daphne Savage, a friend of Sally Carstairs, one of the protagonists in that strange case, admits to being carefree and irresponsible in those days. Mr Crispin, again perhaps on Fen's insistence, claims that Fen was in his early forties. This is an impossibility, given the evidence above. In any event, all doubts about the dating of this case are removed in Buried For Pleasure, the events of which are clearly identified as occurring in September 1947, and which mention the Castrevenford affair as taking place earlier that year.
Buried For Pleasure was the title Crispin used to describe the events in the sleepy Devon village of Sanford Angelorum. It was a long idyllic September; Fen not only possessed the sort of attraction for murder that dogs have for fleas, he also possessed an uncanny impact on the weather. Think how many of his cases took place in glorious sunshine or unseasonable mildness. While it is true that many of them occurred during the summer, in these Isles the correlation between that season and warm weather is at best coincidental. Yet Moving Toyshop, Buried For Pleasure,, Love Lies Bleeding and The Long Divorce all took place during high sunshine, while Glimpses of the Moon took place during an Indian Summer in October. It is tempting to suppose that both Fen and Crispin, two men of undoubted high spirit, had a habit of seeing those days much as adults tend to see their childhood summers: endless sun and fun.
Certainly Buried For Pleasure was full of both. Fen being Fen, there was of course murder involved. The first had happened before his arrival, the second while he was there. And why was he there? To prove, yet again, his need for stimulation. This time he had decided politics were his forte and was standing as an independent candidate in the by-election. His initial naivity about politics was soon disabused by his agent, Captain Watkyn, who assured him it didn’t matter what he promised, as he would be unable to deliver to it anyway. But as he plied cliché upon cliché, and found his support growing, he found himself enjoying the proceedings less and less, and began to fear he would win. Fen was at his rudest in his closing speech, a classic of invective. He was elected, to his horror, with a majority of one, but was later disqualified, thanks to an irregularity in his accounts.
As far as detection went, it has to be confessed that it was scarcely the most demanding of Fen's cases. Indeed, for this historian, it was perhaps most significant as the case in which Fen first encountered Inspector Humbleby, the man who was to play such a prominent future part in Fen's career.
A further case for Fen in 1947 was The Quick Brown Fox, although Mr Crispin does not reveal the month that this took place. This is one of those tales that Fen himself occasionally related to a spell-bound audience. Wakefield, of whom nothing (other than his resentment of Fen’s talkativeness), is known, was a regular listener, however unwilling, to these reminiscences, as was Haldane. It proved a relatively simple matter for Fen to establish who had murdered Philip Odell, the man who had inadvertently become entangled with the Munsey sisters. Fen's general knowledge played its part here, as he understood the significance of the typed words 'the quick brown fox'.
