A younger author belonging to [the] … donnish school of detective story-writers is "Edmund Crispin" (Robert Bruce Montgomery), also an Oxford man and an educationalist, as devoted as Michael Innes to the polysyllabic adjective, the abstruse noun, and whimsical proper names. His amateur investigator, Dr. Gervase Fen, is himself an Oxford don who writes detective stories, when not distracted from his literary labours by mysterious crimes affecting his personal friends, the headmaster of a public school, for instance, in Love Lies Bleeding (1948), where the plot turns on the discovery of the original manuscript of a 'lost' Shakespeare play. To offset his somewhat 'precious' literary style, "Edmund Crispin" has a vein of original humour, a talent for vivid description, unusual settings and intriguing titles—Frequent Hearses, The Moving Toyshop, Beware of the Trains—and is one of the most promising English writers of the genre to come to the fore...