The Long Divorce
| American first edition | |
| Author | Edmund Crispin |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Series | Gervase Fen |
| Genre | Detective |
| Publisher | Gollancz Dodd, Mead (US) |
Publication date | 1951 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | |
| Preceded by | Frequent Hearses |
| Followed by | Beware of the Trains |
The Long Divorce is a 1951 detective novel by the British writer Edmund Crispin, the eighth in his series featuring the Oxford professor and amateur detective Gervase Fen.[1] It was the penultimate novel in the series, with a gap or more than twenty five years before the next entry The Glimpses of the Moon , although a collection of short stories Beware of the Trains was published in 1953. The novel features many traits of a Golden Age mystery, set in a small, wealthy English village. The title doesn't refer to a marriage but is a quote from Shakespeare's Henry VIII "the long divorce of steel".[2] It was published in the United States by Dodd, Mead in 1951 under the same title, and a year later as A Noose for Her.
Synopsis
[edit ]A series of poison pen letters have disrupted the calm of the picturesque English village of Cotton Abbas. Amongst those receiving the messages are an attractive, young female doctor and a bluff Yorkshire businessman whose teenage daughter has become infatuated with a Swiss schoolmaster. Things take a more serious turn when a woman commits suicide after receiving a letter threatening to expose a deeply-held secret, and the case continues to baffle the local police force, including the chief constable of the county who lives in the village. To add to the mystery, a man arrives to stay at the inn calling himself Mr. Datchery (an alias he has clearly taken from Dickens' Edwin Drood ) and an unlikely story that he is there conducting research for Mass Observation.
References
[edit ]Bibliography
[edit ]- Bargainnier, Earl F. Comic Crime. Popular Press, 1987.
- Hubin, Allen J. Crime Fiction, 1749–1980: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Garland Publishing, 1984.
- Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.
- Whittle, David. Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books. Routledge, 2017.
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