Wilm W. Elwenspoek Books

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.

The shocking and explosive hardboiled classic: From murderers to prostitutes, corrupt politicians and racist white detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, Harlem's toughest detective duo, must carry the day against an absurdist world of racism and class warfare.

Gervase Fen is summoned by a friend to a pretty village whose inhabitants are thrown into distress by a spate of anonymous poison-pen letters

The classic crime thrillers of Edmund Crispin are quite unlike any others in their constantly digressing good humour, their smart puzzle-setting and their strong-skewed sense of what is right and fair. In Buried for Pleasure, his don-detective Gervase Fenn comes to the out-of-way village of Sanford Angelorum to stand in a Parliamentary by-election; he has just finished a major piece of academic work and needs diversion. Almost at once, he recognises another guest in the hotel as an incognito police inspector from London, learns of a local woman poisoned by her blackmailer and then Inspector Bussy is killed, seemingly stabbed in the throat by an escaped lunatic. Not especially enjoying the by-election, Fenn takes a hand in the investigation and finds himself caught up with dotty psychiatrists, ecclesiastical poltergeists, lost heirs and a small and unappealing pig. As Jonathan Gash points out in his introduction, it would be a mistake to regard this as merely cosy or merely a romp; the Crispin novels showed what could be done to the detective novel with a bit of style. Fenn is a fascinating detective because we get to know so much of the over-stocked interior of his highly intelligent head.

Privatdetektiv Caryl O'Hara wird von der attraktiven Mrs. Ivory für einen lukrativen Job angeheuert, ist jedoch wenig begeistert. Seine Schwäche für schöne Frauen führt ihn in Schwierigkeiten, besonders im Umgang mit dem gewalttätigen Ehemann der drogenabhängigen Esmaralda Ricaud.