Edmund Crispin is the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery, b. 1921, Chesterham Bois, Buckinghamshire, England; d. Devonshire, England, 1978. There is no published biography of Bruce Montgomery, as he was known, apart from thumbnail sketches in several reference works. Most of the details given here are taken from Kingsley Amis's Memoirs (Hutchinson, London, 1991), which includes a six-page reminiscence of Montgomery.
Bruce Montgomery, of mixed Scots-Irish heritage, was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and in 1940 entered St. John's College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages and was also "organ scholar", i.e. organist and choirmaster in the college chapel. He received grudging admiration from his peers for his simultaneous success in music and literature: as an active campus musician, he conducted the University Musicians' Club choir, and during the same period was a member of a circle of aspiring writers, which included Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. By the time he had finished his degree in 1944 (he was exempted from military service on medical grounds) he had already published his first mystery novel and had acquired a reputation as a sophisticate who owned a grand piano, patronized hotel bars, and had produced serious scholarship.
Immediately after graduation, he spent two years as assistant master at Shrewsbury public school, but his main career was as a pianist, organist, and composer, especially of film music, and as a writer of film scripts and radio plays. By about 1950 he had written some church music and works for small forces, but by later in that decade he was working almost entirely for the cinema, where his best-known scores were for the Carry On series, and at the same time giving concerts and recitals and turning out books by Edmund Crispin. The 1950s were the years of his greatest success, in which he was reputed to hobnob with movie stars and enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle, but after about 1960 his career demonstrably faltered. He retired to Totnes in Devonshire, produced no new books, and rarely came to London. His lifelong habit of drinking had become chronic alcoholism. During this period he edited several science fiction anthologies and was also, from 1967, the mystery fiction reviewer for the (London) Sunday Times, but was sometimes too incoherent to work. Though long a bachelor, he eventually married, very late in life (Amis gives his wife's name as Ann), and when sober he seems to have remained lovable and generous. His death, hastened by alcohol, was in Devonshire, a year after finishing his final novel; his life, according to Amis, is a version of the classic tale of a prodigy whose talent dried up at age 30 and who took to drink as a result.
With a single exception, all of Crispin's mystery novels were published in a single nine-year period, 1944-1953. His first novel, Case of the Gilded Fly, was written in a single vacation (after reading and admiring John Dickson Carr's The Crooked Hinge) in 1942, while Montgomery was still an undergraduate. The success of the book prompted him to change his plans of entering the civil service, and he wrote Gervase Fen mysteries at the rate of one per year until 1952. Montgomery never gave an outright reason for the abrupt halt in Crispin's mystery output; one might theorize that his growing success in the world of film combined with a sense that he had already explored the limits of the fair-play mystery genre. After his long "fallow" period, he finally returned one last time to Gervase Fen with Glimpses of the Moon, written just before his death in 1978, and he acknowledged in a short memoir in the Armchair Detective that he was motivated by financial need. The novels are, generally speaking, mixtures of detailed puzzles and high entertainment, laced with lashings of screwball comedy and situations that snowball from the absurd to the utterly ridiculous.
Of Crispin's work, only a couple of short stories do not star the Oxford don and amateur detective Gervase Fen, perhaps partly based on W. G. Moore, a don at St John's. Irrepressible and eloquent, Fen is an entertaining caricature of the eccentric professor, an impatient, egotistical, overbearing, and occasionally brilliant man who has a child's enthusiasm (and lack of discretion) about trailing criminals in a most un-donnish manner and driving his illbehaved little sports car, Lily Christine. He changes very little during the opus, even in the 25-year gap, except perhaps to become a bit more rooted in reality as Crispin got older. He is revealed, at one point, to be married, but his wife never figures in the stories and one assumes that she is possessed of great equanimity. His friendship with the local chief of police allows him access to crime scenes with impunity, and his glee in chasing criminals is only exceeded by his petulance when it lands him in trouble.
Crispin's books, while very fair-play mysteries at heart, are so engagingly frivolous in tone that it is easy to read them for the sheer vivacity of his wit rather than the puzzling out of the clues. He has a very sharp sense of humor which runs to the intellectual and literary, delights at making fun of stereotypical characters, and throws in a variety of nonsense-- plot details that serve no purpose but to introduce a joke-- for no other reason than, one suspects, pure high spirits. Combine his sense of fun with the solid coherence of the mystery plots, and you have the Crispin experience.