Fen country
Oct. 3rd, 2008 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarielI’m perpetually on the lookout for books which will entertain an exacting ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mraltariel, so when purple_pen mentioned that she had enjoyed Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop and how much it had reminded her of Doctor Who, I pulled down the copy that has been languishing on a shelf for *cough*ty years, blew off the dust, and offered it to himself.
Big success. We are now tracking down Crispin’s other detective novels (he wrote nine altogether; so far we’ve found four). His sleuth is the vain and clever Professor of English at Oxford, Gervase Fen, who postures around post-war Britain in a small red sports car “of exceptional stridency and raffishness”, and solves crime through wit, reason, and literary allusion. Stylistically, they are magnificent – easily some of the best sentences I’ve read this year – and they are also extremely funny.
Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts (‘The Shakespeare Code’, ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’) has said of The Moving Toyshop that “It’s more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who”; Crispin’s novel Love Lies Bleeding is – like ‘The Shakespeare Code’ – concerned with the lost play Love’s Labour’s Won.
As an aside, I recently listened to the very funny Big Finish audio The One Doctor, written by Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman. It occurs to me that if a new Hitchhiker’s book has to be commissioned, then a trick has been missed not getting these two to write it.
mraltariel, so when purple_pen mentioned that she had enjoyed Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop and how much it had reminded her of Doctor Who, I pulled down the copy that has been languishing on a shelf for *cough*ty years, blew off the dust, and offered it to himself. Big success. We are now tracking down Crispin’s other detective novels (he wrote nine altogether; so far we’ve found four). His sleuth is the vain and clever Professor of English at Oxford, Gervase Fen, who postures around post-war Britain in a small red sports car “of exceptional stridency and raffishness”, and solves crime through wit, reason, and literary allusion. Stylistically, they are magnificent – easily some of the best sentences I’ve read this year – and they are also extremely funny.
Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts (‘The Shakespeare Code’, ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’) has said of The Moving Toyshop that “It’s more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who”; Crispin’s novel Love Lies Bleeding is – like ‘The Shakespeare Code’ – concerned with the lost play Love’s Labour’s Won.
As an aside, I recently listened to the very funny Big Finish audio The One Doctor, written by Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman. It occurs to me that if a new Hitchhiker’s book has to be commissioned, then a trick has been missed not getting these two to write it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-08 08:27 am (UTC)That's the one!
I quite liked the JPW Wimseys when I read then (the second more), but it had been a while since I'd read DLS. When I went back to Sayers, you could see the difference.
BTW, how did you find your way to this journal?
no subject
Date: 2008-10-08 08:06 pm (UTC)Through Qatsi's friends page, I think -- though I wouldn't claim that being a casual passing reader qualifies as a "friend"...
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Date: 2008-10-09 10:02 am (UTC)