Edmund Crispin's Life

Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, an English crime writer and composer. He was born in 1921 of Scots-Irish parentage and educated at Merchant Taylors’. Declared unfit for war service, he was able to study French and German at St. John’s College, Oxford, where he became friends with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. He graduated from the college in 1943, with a BA in modern languages, having for two years been its organist and choirmaster. He then spent two years as a teacher at Shrewsbury School, and in 1944 published the first of nine Gervase Fen novels, The Case of the Gilded Fly (coming out later this year in Vintage). Montgomery then gave up his teaching post at Shrewsbury and moved to Devon, where he lived a rather solitary existence immersed in his writing and music. Apart from writing the Gervase Fen novels, Crispin also composed music under his own name, Bruce Montgomery. He composed choral and orchestral works, songs, and film music, including several scores for Gerald Thomas's Carry On series and films based on Richard Gordon's humorous novels.

Crispin also anthologized seven volumes of science fiction, and was an early pioneer of the genre. As well as his interest in science fiction, Crispin became a well respected reviewer of crime, writing for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death in 1978.

In previous editions of his books, Crispin listed his recreations as swimming, excessive smoking, Shakespeare, the operas of Wagner and Strauss, idleness and cats. His antipathies were dogs, the French Film, the Renaissance of the British Film, psychoanalysis, the psychological-realistic crime story, and the contemporary theatre.

He married his secretary, Ann, when he was 55, just two years before he died from alcohol related problems in 1978.