Review: The Case of the Gilded Fly

The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This is what you get when a young man who has had more education than is good for him, and is smug about it, writes a book. "Edmund Crispin" is a pseudonym, but it perfectly conveys the exact kind of Englishman the author is. It's set in Oxford in the 1940s, which is where the author was studying at the time he wrote it, so he's following "write what you know" even if he sometimes does less well with "show, don't tell".

Very few of the numerous characters (all introduced in a lump, so it's hard to remember who is who) are at all admirable, definitely including the detective, and none of them are happy even before the murders start. This is articulated at some length and with considerable obscure literary reference, most of which failed to land for me because I don't have the exact education the author had. The detective blithely excuses some genuinely awful chosen behaviour, including what we would today call human trafficking, in other characters, while fiercely judging other people for simple human failings they can't help.

The point of view is omniscient, but mostly follows Nigel, a journalist who never seems to do any journalism. He is Watson to the detective's Sherlock, if Watson didn't like or respect Sherlock and found his eccentricities frustrating and overdone. He has a far-too-fast romance with one of the numerous secondary characters/suspects.

I kept reading mostly because I wanted to know how the crime had been done, and it turned out to be contrived and unlikely, as I'd feared. It was both carefully prepared for and also took advantage of a spontaneous situation that couldn't have been predicted, and then the murderer overcomplicated it.

"Overcomplicated" is a good description of the book as a whole. The style is baroque, which isn't to my taste, and that and the annoying characters (and narrator) and the rigged ending bring it down to three stars for me. The craft is not bad for a first novel, it's well edited apart from a couple of dangling modifiers, and it was popular both at the time of publication and since, but it wasn't a good fit for me, and I won't be reading more in the series.

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