Frequent Hearses (1950) a.k.a. Sudden Vengeance by Edmund Crispin

I was struggling to decide which book to pick from my TBR pile, so I decided upon a re-read and opted for Crispin in the end as I was in the mood for some light relief crime fiction. It also means I am now only one book away from doing a ranked list for Crispin’s novels. I just have The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) to go, which I admit I have put off re-reading.

I don’t have any memories of Frequent Hearses, which I first and last read, for that matter, in 2013. I had a feeling though that it was not one of his best. As you can see in the synopsis below, the social milieu is that of a British film studio. I was curious as to whether Crispin had begun composing for films by this stage in his career and it would seem that it had just about done so. He composed music for Which Will Ye Have? in 1949. However, there seems to have been a four-year hiatus until he composed more music for a film (according to Wikipedia anyway). The more well-known films that he worked on did not come until later in the 1950s and 1960s including: Doctor in the House (1954), Doctor at Large (1957), Carry on Nurse (1959), Carry on Teacher (1959) and Carry on Cruising (1962).

Synopsis

‘Oxford don Gervase Fen is at the film studios to advise about a film biography of Alexander Pope. Gloria Scott appears to have had little reason for wanting to kill herself by jumping off Waterloo bridge, but someone has taken great pains to hide Gloria’s real identity, and Gervase Fen’s detective nose begins to twitch. When a […] cameraman is poisoned before his very eyes, Fen finds himself ‘consulting’ on a far more familiar matter: murder.’

Overall Thoughts

There is something very British in the way the book opens, and it is not the first time Crispin has started a story by focusing on public transport. Based on the beginning of this novel, it sounds like public transport has not improved vastly and some may even argue that it has deteriorated further:

‘The cross-country journey is prolonged and tedious, involving four changes – at stations of progressively diminishing size and increasing antiquity, so that the effect is of witnessing a dramatized History of the Railways in reverse – and, in the upshot, a ruinous, draughty single-decker motor-bus. It is advisable, as a general rule, not to attempt this.’

Naturally Gervase Fen does.

Like in The Long Divorce (1951), we have a village, Long Fulton this time, which is irrevocably changed by “progress” and “modernity”. It is said that the film studio ‘annihilated’ Long Fulton, but this is not depicted in black and white terms, as purely good or bad by the narrative. The villagers themselves see it as a positive thing, which is something the reader might not have expected, given the trend for stories involving angry villagers upset at losing their old way life:

‘[…] there would have been a good deal of querulous correspondence about this in The Times had the evidence allowed anyone colourably to maintain that the process had been deleterious […] Moreover, it is certain that the villagers themselves would have opposed any attempt to protect from the invasion of the Leiper Combine, for the building of the studios not only permitted them intoxicating glimpses of those deities […] to whose worship they address themselves twice weekly in the Regent at Gisford, but also enabled them, by sundry rapacious, underhand devices, to derive much monetary profit from the incursion […] Left to their own exiguous devices, they had mismanaged Long Fulton to the point of virtual extinction. They were only too glad to surrender their independence to the studios, and would have stood out in a body against any scheme that proposed restoring it to them.’

Nevertheless, Crispin does not present this situation through rose tinted glasses:

‘Fronting the road there was an attempt at a façade, but its failure to impart coherence to the structures behind it was so patent that aesthetically it would have a great deal preferable if the attempt had not been made at all. The road itself was decimated by a weight of traffic for which it had never been designed, and its air of dilapidation was echoed wherever you looked. The pervasive whitewash badly needed renewing; bomb damage […] had been patched up rather than properly repaired; and the great stages, towering monolithically above the other buildings, looked quite capable of folding up at the advent of a high wind.’

I enjoyed the complex ambiguity of this scene setting and it is one of the few extended scene descriptions in this book which does not lose energy the longer it goes on. In general, I think the author perhaps over scene sets, with their being a lot of longer descriptions of the various settings. Within these passages witticisms are intended but I think in some places their humorous purpose is not sustained. In contrast, some of the best ones are funny images which are encapsulated in one or two sentences.

Crispin deglamourises what it is like to be a in film studio: ‘Nor were matters very much improved when you got inside. There were large zigzag cracks in the walls; flakes of whitewash were liable to detach themselves from the ceilings and settle in your hair; dust was omnipresent and cleanliness doubtful; of the multiplicity of telephones which constituted the principal furnishings, at least a third were perpetually out of order.’ Is this description based on his own experiences, I wonder?

The opening chapters have a number of attention-grabbing phrases and sentences on a range of topics. For example, there is this interesting reference to the victim:

‘Her death, and the appalling consequences of which followed it, was perhaps shocking precisely because she was so unimportant; it was as if a bomb had gone off in an area confidently scheduled by the authorities as completely safe…’

Whilst those who love the work of Henry James might wish to advert their gaze from the following put down Detective Inspector Humbley gives of his work, describing it as a ‘narcotic’. He further adds that: ‘I always feel that Henry James ought to be dealt with in the Dangerous Drugs Act and perhaps used in childbirth as an alternative to trilene…’ Finally, there is also this description of a composer: ‘“A composer,” she explained soberly, like one who refers to some necessary but unromantic bodily function.’ Reading between the lines I think Crispin portrays composers at film studios as being put upon and not kindly dealt with.

Fifty or so pages into the novel, Detective Inspector Humbley, who is friends with Gervase Fen says to his pal: “You seem to be a great deal more serious than I remembered.” Interestingly Fen replies: “As I get older,” he explained, “I get less resilient and more predictable. It depresses me sometimes.” I pondered this for a little while, as I wondered how true it was of the character of Fen and ultimately, I think it has some truth in it, as the later novels in the series do tone down Fen’s madcap actions, his predilection for dangerous car chases and encouragement of student antics and anarchy.  

Shifting to the plot, I think it was a good idea that Crispin added a further death, a definite murder, not long into the book. Gloria’s suicide occurs before novel begins, so the second death gives the mystery more shape and a stronger focus, as I feel a suicide can otherwise be a difficult event to use as the sole focus or main anchor in a mystery novel. There is an extended episode in the story which features neither Humbley nor Fen and instead involves a private enquiry agent, who also indulges in burglary and blackmail. It is his selling of an incriminating letter to a newspaper, which cracks open the case. I am undecided about the value of this plot device. Does it enable Fen and Humbley to more naturally access the key information? Arguably they would have struggled to get this information by trying to force unhelpful suspects to speak. Or does this device hand too much information on a plate for the police to use? Fen has a smaller role in this book and is off the page for long chunks of time. Unlike in earlier cases, he is not at the centre of the active drama of the plot. This task is taken on by a minor witness who ends up stuck in a maze in the dark with a crazed killer. This sounds like it should be an exciting sequence of events, but I found the long-winded narration style lacked the energy of the earlier novels and as such dragged on.

The plot has more substance to it than The Long Divorce, in my opinion, but I feel like we get no real sense of who the suspects are, and Gloria recedes into the background quite quickly. Her past is not a focus of the text and is unfurled near the end. The killer is an insignificant character you barely meet, which I felt led to a flatter ending. This is a shame as there is good logic behind why the killer is who they are and how Fen spotted them. Moreover, I felt that the denouement had an interesting feature to it, which structurally, as well as thematically, incorporates the idea of [SPOILER ROT 13 CODE] n xvyyre’f arrq gb eryvir/ergryy gurve fgbel naq ubj gung ercrgvgvba zrrgf n cflpubybtvpny arrq jvguva gurz.

Rating: 3.75/5