A Gervase Fen Mystery by Edmund Crispin, set in the academic setting of Oxford where Fen, the amateur detective is a professor of English Language and Literature. The mystery is fairly ordinary – there is one man that everybody in a certain opera band hates, this man dies, and everyone has an alibi. The eccentrically brilliant Fen solves the case that the reader has solved already halfway through the book.
What make the series worth reading are the elegance of prose and the various interesting (if not always familiar) allusions to literary stuff. I read Fen mysteries for the illusion of erudition it gives me, although I can’t really claim to understand all literary references.
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Book: Swan Song
Author: Edmond Crispin
Year of (Re)Publication: 2006
