"Holy Disorders" [is one of Crispin's earliest books], and it is very much in the British tradition. It has elements of horror (what was the Thing in the cathedral that drove the organist insane?). It has a locked-room element. It has a diagram, a timetable and an "impossible" crime. It is strongly indebted to Dorothy Sayers and John Dickson Carr.

Traditionalists adore it as well as the other Gervase Fen books, which are rather literate, full of quotations from the classics, and even with a tongue-in-cheek feeling that suggests that Crispin … did not take the conventions with all seriousness. But the big trouble with the Gervase Fen books is Gervase Fen. Crispin was trying to evoke a character in the great line of British eccentrics. What he ended up with was an artificial character who says things like "Oh, my fur and whiskers" when he is not saying...