Swan Song, by Edmund Crispin (Collins Crime Club, 2018; originally published 1947)

An offensive but popular opera singer. A cast who loathes him. And a new director he’s trying to ruin.

Almost everyone would be happy to see Edwin Shorthouse dead—but as the book’s back cover description asks, “Who amongst them has the fiendish ingenuity to kill him in his own locked dressing room?”

The time: post-war England. The town: Oxford. The tone: omniscient and gently old-fashioned, with some complex sentences and rare vocabulary. I read it as a paperback, and an ebook with digital dictionary would have been a plus.

This is one of those books to read slowly and appreciate the atmosphere—and the locked room puzzle. Readers familiar with Wagner’s Die Meistersinger will understand the references, but I didn’t bother to look them up and still followed the story. In places that was tricky, as there’s a full cast of characters and the names would get mixed up in my mind.

Swan Song is actually number 4 in the Gervase Fen series, Mr. Fen being an Oxford professor and amateur sleuth. Goodreads lists eleven books, and there may be more. Edmund Crispin is the pseudonym of composer Robert Bruce Montgomery. For more about his books and music, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Crispin.

[Review copy from the public library.]