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BRIEF BIOGRAPHY |
Biography Edmund Crispin, to be perfectly honest about the whole thing, didn't really exist. He was the pen name of a talented writer and composer, Robert Bruce Montgomery. Montgomery was born in 1921, and was educated at St. John's College, Oxford, in the late 1930s. He was a founding member of The Carr Society, a club of devotees of the mystery works of the great Anglo-American novelist, John Dickson Carr. Challenged by a friend to write a mystery novel of his own, he produced the first of several, that being The Case of the Gilded Fly. This was followed by a string of successful tales, published by Victor Gollancz, and all notable for their cleverness and humour. The Gilded Fly was followed by Holy Disorders', the classic farce of The Moving Toyshop, Buried for Pleasure, Swan Song, a short story collection entitled Beware of the Trains, and The Long Divorce.
There was also a dark side to Crispin: apparently he suffered from a dependency on alcohol; having accomplished so much by the age of thirty, he seems to have succumbed to alcoholism for a significant proportion of the remainder of his life. Tragically, this nipped much of his creative force in the proverbial bud, and it was near the end of his life that he recovered himself sufficiently to begin writing again.
Montgomery's return to the persona and work of Crispin was heralded by the 1977 publication of The Glimpses of the Moon, a work which promised of great things that were to come now that he had resumed writing of that most ubiquitous of Oxford dons, Gervase Fen. This promise was sadly left unfulfilled by Montgomery's untimely death in the next year, at the age of 57. A final collection of short stories, entitled Fen Country, drawn from newspaper stories and magazine pieces, was published posthumously in 1979. Nota Bene: This section is by no means thorough or complete, and the information contained within it should be considered provisional. Biographical details are drawn from a number of print and web-based sources, and it is only in an attempt to construct a whole and correct portrait of Crispin / Montgomery that these details are recorded. It has been suggested that a biography of Crispin was in the works back in 1998 (at which time I had a note from Douglas Greene, of Crippen & Landru publishers, to that effect), however, as of this writing, it does not appear from any available sources that it has been completed. Anyone with additional biographical information, or notes of a biography in the works, please contact me and I will be more than happy to revised and update as needed. Photos of Crispin are from the covers of two old Penguin editions, and I claim no rights to them - they are merely reproduced so that readers may see what the fellow looked like! -- William Nedblake |
Montgomery's first love
was his calling as a composer, and one of the most readily apparent
for his long cessation of writing was his finding that he could
make a living in this pursuit. He was a prolific composer of
film music, writing for six of the popular 'Carry On' films,
and original choral works. Operating under the guise of Edmund
Crispin, he also edited and compiled a number of anthologies
of science fiction, suspense stories, and detective fiction,
and he wrote regular reviews of crime fiction for the Times.
Crispin once wrote of himself:
"He is of sedentary habit, his chief recreations being music,
reading, churchgoing and bridge. Like Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe
he leaves the house as seldom as possible, in particular minimizing
his visits to London, a rapidly decaying metropolis which since
the last war he has come to detest."