The Long Divorce

As inventive as Agatha Christie, as hilarious as P.G. Wodehouse – discover the delightful detective stories of Edmund Crispin. Crime fiction at its quirkiest and best.

Long inhabited by a collection of profoundly offbeat locals, there has been a recent influx of the newly rich and well to do arriving in the village of Cotten Abbas … and not everyone is happy about it. New arrivals are receiving anonymous letters that know a little too much about dark secrets and dirty laundry.

Gervase Fen is summoned to the scene, but soon finds more than he bargained for. A suicide on Friday, a murder by Sunday, and some villagers that seem hell bent on keeping this mystery unsolved…

Reviews

‘Both the mature and the discerning young choose to pick up one of Crispin's beautifully turned crime novels’
The Times

‘Crispin isn't in it for the mystery, but for the enigmas’ Guardian

‘His books are full of high spirits and excellent jokes, with constant literary allusions and an atmosphere of bibulous good humour. But at times the mood turns darker, and Crispin is capable of passages of both genuine suspense and ingenius deduction’
Daily Telegraph

‘Crispin is noted for an ability to embellish clever story lines with Marx Brothers touches’
New York Times

‘Rightly elevated to classic status’
New York Sun

About the author

Robert Bruce Montgomery was born in Buckinghamshire in 1921, and was a golden age crime writer as well as a successful concert pianist and composer. Under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin, he wrote 9 detective novels and 42 short stories. In addition to his reputation as a leader of the mystery genre, he contributed to many periodicals and newspapers and edited sci–fi anthologies. After the golden years of the 1950s he retired from the limelight to Devonshire until his death in 1978.