One night, Richard Cadogan, poet and would-be bon-vivant, finds the body of an elderly woman in an Oxford toyshop, and is hit on the head. When he comes to, he finds that the toyshop has disappeared and been replaced with a grocery store. A quirky and appealing mystery for fans of classic crime....

Small disturbances have surprising ramifications at the Castrevenford School, in another taut and clever Crispin novel. Gervase Fen, the Oxford Professor who has been invited to give a speech at the school, is soon in the thick of a mystery that grows deadlier as it becomes more inexplicable. What, if anything, is worth the risk of committing murder?...

Oxford don and part-time detective Gervase Fen is in the town of Tolnbridge where he is happily bounding around with a butterfly net until the cathedral organist is murdered, giving Fen the chance to play sleuth. Tracking down the culprit pleases Fen immensely. Only the reader will have a better time....

Hired to advise on a movie about the poet Alexander Pope, Professor Gervase Fen is introduced to the glamorous world of 1940s film -- a world with which Crispin (in reality composer Bruce Montgomery, particularly noted for his film-scores) was gleefully, maliciously familiar....

Hurrah! With the Nazi's routed, the British can sing Wagner again. The company assembled in Oxford for the first post-war production of Die Meistersinger is delighted, but their happiness is soured by word that the odious Edwin Shorthouse will be singing a leading role. Nearly everyone in the company has reason to loathe Shorthouse, but who could have had the feindish ingenuity to kill him in his own locked dressing room? Answering that question will require a certain finesse, a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain eccentric professor of English Literature with a passion for amateur detecting. Happily, Gervase Fen is on the scene, fresh from his adventures in The Case of the Gilded Fly and Holy Disorders, with his sleuthing skills as sharp as his epigrams....

Gervase Fen--the eccentric Oxford don with a knack for solving “impossible” crimes--made his debut in The Case of the Gilded Fly, which Edmund Crispin (in reality, composer Bruce Montgomery) wrote to win a bet. With Holy Disorders, Crispin’s skills matured, but Fen remains as maddeningly childish as ever, still deliciously fond of his own wit and erudition, and given to quoting Lewis Carroll at inappropriate occasions. First published in 1945, Holy Disorders takes Fen to the town of Tolnbridge, where he is happily bounding around with a butterfly net until the cathedral organist is murdered, giving Fen the chance to play sleuth. The man didn’t have an enemy in the world, and even his music was inoffensive: Could he have fallen afoul of a nest of German spies or of the local coven of witches, ominously rumored to have been practicing since the 17th century? Tracking down the answer pleases Fen immensely--only the reader will have a better time. This, said the New York Times Book Review, is “Fen at his very best.”...

It's a naughty world, a tiresome world, a world notably lacking in witty epigrams. In short, it's a world that is crying out for Gervase Fen, and so he has declared himself a candidate for Parliament, ready to serve the good people of.where was it again? Fen's political ambitions, though, get just a little sidetracked by the murdered policeman who crops up on the campaign trail, not to mention the escaped (and naked) lunatic who's convinced he's Woodrow Wilson. And then there's the peculiar clergyman and the love-struck pig....

Professor Gervase Fen is happy to step in when his old friend, the headmaster of the exclusive Castrevenford School, needs a guest speaker for the school's annual Speech Day. (Though the headmaster, it must be said, has his doubts as to whether Fen is "capable of the sustained hypocrisy which the occasion demands.") Fen's happiness, however, turns to positive glee when it becomes clear that his sleuthing skills are needed: Not only has a student at the local girls' school been trifled with in some unspecified, clearly fiendish fashion, but poison has been swiped from the chemistry department, and two, yes two teachers have been murdered! Too bad, of course, for the teachers, but for Fen it's a very good day indeed....