Edmund Crispin enjoyed an active and diversified career. He is known primarily as the creator of Gervase Fen, amateur detective as well as Oxford professor of English language and literature. But Crispin was also an anthologist, chiefly of science fiction, an author of film scripts and radio plays, and, after 1967, a mystery-fiction reviewer for the London Sunday Times. Crispin's real name was Robert Bruce Montgomery, and as Bruce Montgomery he was a pianist, organist, conductor, and composer not only of background music for films but also of serious music. He described himself in a partly autobiographical sketch in the Armchair Detective (1979) as "a lazy person essentially, and of a sedentary habit." (All Crispin quotes are from this article unless otherwise stated.) He had chosen professions requiring effort, an audience, and a certain amount of public recognition, yet he called himself in World Authors (1975) "a person temperamentally requiring a...