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A life in two arts
Mysteries and music were its dual passions, Glyn Paflin discovers
 Bruce Montgomery, who wrote as Edmund Crispin |
| Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A life in music and books David Whittle
Ashgate £60 (978-0-7546-3443-0) Church Times Bookshop £54 SINCE Inspector Morse’s death, it is a mystery why television has not rediscovered Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford. I say “rediscovered”, since among the many interesting facts in this very full biography of the detective novelist Edmund Crispin is that a TV adaptation of his humorous Oxford story The Moving Toyshop was shown in 1964. No less than Hitchcock had paid to use the book’s Botley Fair climax to end his film Strangers on a Train. Crispin was more tunesmith than Highsmith, however. His crime fiction, taking its cue from Dickson Carr, was for most of his life second string to his main ambition — to be a composer. Detection-lovers can find his novels slight in construction, and the high spirits and frivolous asides irritating. But to others, that is part of their charm — as is their literary allusiveness. Whittle, a former head chorister at Peterborough, is well placed to appreciate a tale such as Crispin’s Holy Disorders; but it is as a student of the musical career — conducted under Crispin’s real name, Bruce Montgomery — that he uncovers the most tantalising trail. From a wartime position as organist at St John’s College, Oxford — where he formed firm boozy friendships with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin — via a brief spell in teaching, Montgomery was transported by his early brilliance into the glamorous world of film. He had a gift for the intricate timings of music for comedies; and, already noted at Oxford for his sophisticated tastes, he was captivated by the rewards; but later he found the pressures manageable only with the help of alcohol, and, although he wrote the scores for more than 40 films (and the script for one: Raising the Wind), a disaster over Carry on Cruising in 1962 meant the work dried up. Once he had the leisure to write the concert music he aspired to, something deserted him; and his health, always poor, declined painfully. He ploughed a new furrow as a critic, and a respected editor of science-fiction anthologies. Uneasy with women, he relied in his last years on a motherly secretary, who left her first husband (who had moved his “popsy” into the house) to marry him. She was a churchgoer, and, notwithstanding this matrimonial tangle, Montgomery was confirmed in 1974 by Bishop Wilfred Westall. He was preparing himself spiritually, with the help of the clergy in Dartington, in the months before his death in 1978. Not all of his musical scores survive; but enough do to enable Whittle to engage in a positive critical appraisal. One early published work was a cantata, On the Resurrection of Christ, in memory of Charles Williams. To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price") |
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