Holy Disorders
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.Holy Disorders takes Oxford don and part time detective Gervase Fen to the town of Tolnbridge, where he is happily bounding around with a butterfly net until the cathedral organist is murdered, giving Fen the chance to play sleuth. The man didn't have an enemy in the world, and even his music was inoffensive: could he have fallen foul of a nest of German spies or of the local coven of witches, ominously rumored to have been practicing since the 17th century?
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EDMUND CRISPIN
Holy Disorders
Ther saugh I first the derke ymaginyng
Of felonye, and al the compassyng;
The crueel ire, reed as any gleede;
The pykepurs, and eke the pale drede;
The smylere, with the knyfe under the cloke;
The shepne, brennynge with the blake smoke;
The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;
The open werre, with woundes al bibleddeâ¦
The nayl y-driven in the shode a-nyght;
The colde deeth, with mouth gapyng uprightâ¦â
Chaucer
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
Victor Gollancz 1946
Copyright © Rights Limited,
1946. All rights reserved
Edmund Crispin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover image © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008124182
Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008124199
Version: 2017-10-26
To my parents
Contents
Chapter 1: Invitation and Warning
Chapter 2: Do not Travel for Pleasure
Chapter 6: Murder in the Cathedral
Chapter 9: Three Suspects and a Witch
Chapter 14: In the Last Analysis
| Continually at my bedâs head |
| A hearse doth hang, which doth me tell |
| That I ere morning may be dead⦠|
| SOUTHWELL |
As his taxi burrowed its way through the traffic outside Waterloo Station, like an over-zealous bee barging to the front of a dilatory swarm, Geoffrey Vintner re-read the letter and telegram which he had found on his breakfast table that morning.
He felt as unhappy as any man without pretension to the spirit of adventure might feel who has received a threatening letter accompanied by sufficient evidence to suggest that the threats contained in it will probably be carried out. Not for the first time that morning, he regretted that he had ever persuaded himself to set out on his uncomfortable errand, to leave his cottage in Surrey, his cats, his garden (whose disposition he changed almost daily in accordance with some new and generally impracticable fancy), and his estimable and long-suffering housekeeper, Mrs Body. He was not, he considered (and the thought recurred with gloomy frequency as the series of adventures on which he was about to embark went its way), of a mould which engages very successfully in physical violence. Once one is over forty one cannot, even in moments of high enthusiasm, throw oneself heartily into anonymous and mortal battles against unscrupulous men. And when, moreover, one is a finical bachelor, moderately well-off, bred in a secluded country rectory, and with a mind undisturbed by sordid cares and overmastering passions, the thing begins to appear not only impossible but frankly ludicrous. It was no consolation to reflect that men like himself had fought with the courage and tenacity of bears all the way back to the Dunkirk beaches; they at least knew what they were up against.
Threats.
He groped in his coat pocket, pulled out a large, ancient revolver, and looked at it with that mixture of alarm and affection which dog-lovers bestow on a particularly ferocious animal. The driver regarded this proceeding bleakly in the driving-mirror as they entered upon the expanses of Waterloo Bridge. And a new thought entered Geoffrey Vintnerâs head as, observing this deprecatory glare, he hastily put the gun away again: people had been known to be abducted in taxis, which hovered about their houses until they emerged, and then conveyed them resistlessly away to some place like Limehouse, where they were dealt with by gangs of armed thugs. He gazed dubiously at the short, stocky figure which sat with rock-like immobility in front of him, dexterously skirting the roundabout at the north end of the bridge. Certainly there was only one train which he could have caught from Surrey that morning, in time to get his connexion from Paddington, so his enemies, whoever they were, would have known when to meet him; on the other hand, he had had some considerable difficulty in finding a taxi at all, and without exception they had all seemed concerned more with eluding his attention than with trying to attract it. So that was probably all right.
