Edmund Crispin wrote nine murder mystery novels starring his sleuth Gervase Fen. A source within CIEP recommended them to me. The only one I could find on a quick search of Amazon was The Case of the Gilded Fly which happens to be the first of the nine. So what was it like?
   First, it is set in 1940 in Oxford. Therefore at the start of WWII, although that hardly impacts on the story, apart from the need for blackouts.
   Let me compare TCoTGF with Agatha Christie’s books (bearing in mind that I have only read one of Crispin’s so far).
   The quality of the writing is better. I could imagine somebody reading a Crispin book because of its smooth literary style, clever descriptions and realistic settings. Christie gets what she needs to onto the page, but you’d scarcely call her a literary whizz.
   The characters of Crispin are better drawn than Christie’s. Perhaps that’s just a consequence of my first point. For both authors, the characters are really placeholders for plot points or red herrings – but still, Crispin’s have more character than Christie’s.
   Crispin’s TCoTGF  contains a lot of droll humour and I imagine his other books do too. There’s something to smile about on nearly every page, and some laugh out loud moments. Christie can do humour (read the start of Orient Express, for example), and Poirot does make the occasional quip or dry comments, but not to the extent of Crispin and his characters.
   So far all the nods have gone to Crispin… but then we come to plot. Agatha Christie isn’t known as the Queen of Mystery for nothing. Her plots are almost all immaculate and very, very difficult to figure out as a reader. Crispin’s (on the basis of TCoTGF ) are not nearly as good. I managed to work out the how of the murder quite easily – although not, admittedly, the who. Plus Gervase Fen said he’d worked out who had done it ‘within three minutes’ of finding the body. This was interesting, I suppose, but then why didn’t he tell the police? What actually happens in the story doesn’t hang together as well as Agatha Christie’s stories. In TCoTGF  there is a lot of waffle about ethics, about whether Gervase Fen should tell the police who had done it, or not. This is clearly just a device to extend the novel, and I found it a bit tiresome.
   Having said that, I enjoyed the book and will no doubt embark on a search for more of them. If you’d like to read an elegantly written and amusing semi-mystery story for which you have to willingly suspend your disbelief, go for it. But if you prefer a good brain tester with a strong, believable plot, stick with good old Agatha.