PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION TO THE LIFE OF GERVASE FEN

Preface

Many words have been written on the lives of the great detectives; on none more so than Mr Sherlock Holmes whose immortality is guaranteed. He was the master Victorian sleuth. Strangely though, Professor Gervase Fen, to me, the greatest detective of the 20th Century, is nowadays almost forgotten.

The cases of Professor Fen have been splendidly chronicled by Edmund Crispin, and this study will not attempt to rehash his work. It will, however, use the information contained in his writings to attempt to piece together an appraisal of Fen.

Mr Crispin published nine lengthy histories of some of Fen’s most intricate cases, and two volumes of brief summaries of others. To ease the burden of later reading, the following lists the titles of these major accounts. The words in italics are frequently used for brevity in the biography, while the abbreviations are used for even greater brevity.
 

Introduction

Some men are born to biography; others have biography thrust upon them. Yet how often is it that those most worthy of such attention escape it? There can be few more intriguing, and largely untold, life stories than that of Professor Gervase Fen, probably the last of the great amateur detectives.

It is worth stressing that Fen was, indeed, an amateur. Whereas, for several decades, it seemed the worst indictment that could be made of any detective was that of amateurism, the truth was that very few of them were other than professional, albeit outside the employ of the British Crown. ‘Amateur’ was used loosely to mean ‘unofficial’. Perhaps the whole perception of private detection was influenced by the proud boast by the greatest of them all: "I play the game for the game's own sake." Perhaps Holmes did, but he played it for money too, as he showed in the case of The Duke of Holdernesse.

Gervase Fen, however, never once appears to have sought other than intellectual reward for his efforts. Then again, it is probable that if he had attempted to cash in on his talents, he would have found himself socially ostracised. Consider his major cases: only once was he directly summoned to resolve a crime, and even then he arrived before actual murder was committed. Wherever he went — Tolnbridge (Holy Disorders), Sanford Angelorum (Buried For Pleasure), Deepest Warwickshire (Love Lies Bleeding), Long Fulton (Frequent Hearses), Cotton Abbas (The Long Divorce), or Aller (Glimpses of the Moon, ) — murder struck. Moreover, let anybody even plan on visiting him in his Oxford domain, and murder again reared its ugly but ubiquitous head. When Richard Cadogan sought Fen out in The Moving Toyshop, he little knew he was practically signing some death warrants. The unfortunates caught up in Robert Warner’s play in Oxford (The Case of the Gilded Fly), or those innocent operatic players in Swan Song could hardly have expected that their plans to perform in Oxford would lead to such distressing events.

One therefore envisages a professionally detecting Professor Fen as something of an albatross, and thus, perhaps, unlikely to succeed. But allow him retain his amateur status, allow crime to seek him out, and history has shown what followed.

Gervase Fen has been the subject of several books by Edmund Crispin, but these were mere narratives of specific events in what was, in truth, an eventful life. From the evidence of Crispin's writing, not only would Fen have been delighted to have been the subject of a biography, but it is surprising that he did not resort to autobiography. That temptation he appears to have resisted; in any event, his literary output, never very well catalogued by Crispin, has by now vanished. Mr Crispin's sad and untimely demise in 1978, leaves us without any trace of A Manx Ca (sic), the novel Fen intended to write at the end of The Glimpses of the Moon affair.

We have, therefore, only the works of Mr Crispin to provide us with what patchy evidence there is of the life of Gervase Fen. Now Mr Crispin, as a writer, has much to commend him. He was erudite, he was witty, he researched thoroughly those of Fen's cases he chronicled, ensuring that he determined the views of many of the leading protagonists in each case. He was, in short, a damned good writer, with an eye for the absurd. Undoubtedly the man to portray such an eccentric and idiosyncratic character as Professor Fen. Sadly, he suffered from what can charitably be termed as Watsonitis.

It seems to be obligatory on those who chronicle the cases of celebrated sleuths that they must never reveal too much background to the reader. Thus, for example, a cottage industry grew up around the chronology of the Sherlock Holmes cases. Edmund Crispin, in his narratives of the adventures of Gervase Fen, seems to have adopted the same evasiveness. While he did give definite dates for some of the cases, for many others any sort of chronology is possible only through deduction and speculation. The most important of Crispin's works to the biographer, is, undoubtedly, The Case of the Gilded Fly. Not only does Mr Crispin detail the dates of the events involved, he also give us some crucial, if sketchy, background information on his subject.