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 nine detective novels and forty two short stories, combining farcical situations with literary references and sharply observed characterisation. His professional film scores included the well-known scores for the Carry On series. Montgomery graduated from St. John’s College, Oxford in 1943 and was part of a famous literary circle including Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. In addition to his reputation as a leader in the field of mystery genre, he was the regular crime-fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times from 1967 and contributed to many periodicals and newspapers and edited science-fiction anthologies. After the golden years of the 1950s he retired from the limelight to live out a hermetic existence in Totnes in Devonshire until his death in 1978.
‘The Case of the Gilded Fly couldn't be more British if it came packaged with fish and chips’ New York Sun ‘One of the last exponents of the classical English detective story … elegant, literate, and funny’ The Times ‘A classic detective story and a ludicrous literary farce’ Guardian ‘Beneath a formidable exterior he had unsuspected depths of frivolity’ Philip Larkin
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