Description:

Professor Gervase Fen is in Devon working on his masterpiece critique of the modern novel, but keeps getting distracted - by the local animals (several pigs, a mildly insane cat, a horse with sleeping sickness), by the spectacular failures of the local electrical board, by the vicar's practical jokes, by the retired major yearning for another jolly war. Oh, and by the dismembered body, found in a nearby field, whose head keeps turning up in the most unlikely places.

About the Author

Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (usually credited as Bruce Montgomery) (2 October 1921 - 15 September 1978), an English crime writer and composer.

Montgomery wrote nine detective novels and two collections of short stories under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin (taken from a character in Michael Inness Hamlet, Revenge!). The stories feature Oxford don Gervase Fen, who is a Professor of English at the university and a fellow of St Christophers College, a fictional institution that Crispin locates next to St Johns College. Fen is an eccentric, sometimes absent-minded, character reportedly based on the Oxford professor W. E. Moore. The whodunit novels have complex plots and fantastic, somewhat unbelievable solutions, including examples of the locked room mystery. They are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style and contain frequent references to English literature, poetry, and music. They are also among the few mystery novels to break the fourth wall occasionally and speak directly to the audience.