Edmund Crispin

Robert Bruce Montgomery (2 October 1921 – 15 September 1978) was an English crime writer and composer. Known as a composer as Bruce Montgomery, he published his detective novels under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin.

He was known for his detective novels featuring Gervase Fen, starting with The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), and for composing the scores for the early films in the Carry On series.

Life and work

Montgomery was born at 'Blackwood', Bois Lane, Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire, fourth child and only son of Robert Ernest Montgomery (1878-1962) and Marion Blackwood, née Jarvie. His father, of Irish origin, was principal clerk in the India Office and formerly secretary to the High Commissioner of India. His family later settled at Hanwell, in the London Borough of Ealing. Montgomery's mother was Scottish, of a family claiming illegitimate descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie. When Montgomery was two years old, his family moved round the corner to 'Domus', a "big house in a rural setting" that was built according to his father's instructions.

He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and graduated from St John's College, Oxford, in 1943, with a BA in modern languages, having for two years been its organ scholar and choirmaster. While there he became friendly with Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. From 1943 to 1945 he taught at Shrewsbury School and began writing the first of his detective novels. Montgomery encouraged Larkin's writing ambitions, and according to Andrew Motion "by combining a devoted commitment to writing with a huge appetite for drinking and fooling around, he gave Larkin a model of the ways in which art could avoid pretension".

He first became established under his own name as a composer of vocal and choral music, including An Oxford Requiem (1951), but later turned to film work, writing the scores for many British comedies of the 1950s. For the Carry On series he composed six scores (Sergeant, Nurse, Teacher, Constable, Regardless and Cruising), including the original Carry On theme subsequently adapted for later films by Eric Rogers. He also composed the scores to four films in the Doctor film series (House, Sea, Large and Love). Montgomery wrote both the screenplay and score of Raising the Wind (1961), and his other film scores included The Kidnappers (1953), Raising a Riot (1955), Eyewitness (1956), The Truth About Women (1957), The Surgeon's Knife (1957), Please Turn Over (1959), Too Young to Love (1959), Watch Your Stern (1960), No Kidding (1960), Twice Round the Daffodils (1962) and The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966).

Detective novels

Montgomery wrote detective novels and two collections of short stories under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin (taken from a character in Michael Innes's Hamlet, Revenge!). Nine volumes appeared between 1944 and 1953, starting with The Case of The Gilded Fly. The stories feature Oxford don Gervase Fen, who is a professor of English at the university and a fellow of St Christopher's College, a fictional institution that Crispin locates next to St John's College. Fen is an eccentric, sometimes absent-minded, character reportedly based on his tutor, the Oxford professor W. G. Moore (1905-1978).

All of the novels contain frequent references to English literature, poetry, and (in particular) music. Frequent Hearses and Swan Song have a specifically musical backdrop. Swan Song (1947) explores the world of opera during rehearsals for a production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, while Frequent Hearses is set in a film studio, and includes among the characters Napier, a composer of film music. By 1950, when Frequent Hearses was published, Montgomery was already busy elsewhere, also establishing himself as a composer of film music.

Crispin is considered by many to be one of the last great exponents of the classic crime mystery. He was inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1947.

Composer

Bruce Montgomery composed the scores for nearly forty films, including documentaries and thrillers. The Carry-On Suite, arranged by David Whittle from the scores of Carry On Sergeant (1958), Carry On Nurse (1959) and Carry On Teacher (1959), provides a representative example, dominated by the main theme, a comedy March. For Raising the Wind (1961), Montgomery was responsible for the storyline, screenplay and musical score, also conducting the music and acting as technical advisor.

Although his film work got his music out to a huge audience, the numerous comedy scores in particular stand in stark contrast to Bruce Montgomery's concert works and church music with which he started out. These began to appear in the mid-1940s, at the same time his detective novels were appearing under the name Edmund Crispin. An early example is the Overture to a Fairy Tale of 1946, first performed in February 1948 by the Torquay Municipal Orchestra. (Montgomery was living at Brixham at the time).

But church music predominates, the culmination being the Oxford Requiem, commissioned by the Oxford Bach Choir and first performed at the Sheldonian Theatre on 23 May 1951 (The Sheldonian was also the scene of a crime in his novel The Moving Toyshop). He may have been motivated to compose the piece following the death of his close friend and teacher, the organist and composer Godfrey Sampson – thought also to have been the inspiration behind the character Geoffrey Vintner, the organist and friend of Gervase Fen in Holy Disorders. An Oxford Requiem "is Montgomery’s most considerable achievement to date", wrote The Times reviewer, "and confirms the suspicion that he is a real composer with something of real significance to say". The choir of St John's College, Oxford has recorded the final movement, 'Lord, thou hast been our refuge'. The Requiem was followed by his final major work for chorus, the secular Venus' Praise (1952), a setting of seven sixteenth and seventeenth century English poems.