Amid the rehearsals of a new play by a noted playwright, an Oxford theatre company is thrown into turmoil by the antics of one of the actresses, the beautiful and amoral Yseut Haskell. When Yseut's body is discovered in an admirer's rooms, apparently having shot herself in the head, the general reaction is more relief than sorrow. Although Yseut doesn't seem the suicidal type, it is seemingly impossible for anyone to have entered the room and murdered her. Yet that's exactly what English professor and amateur detective Gervase Fen declares has happened.

This would fall into the "locked room" category of mystery stories. I figured out (correctly) early on who the murderer must have been, but not the motive or the means. I enjoyed the lively and intelligent dialogue, although I sometimes felt it was over my head. Crispin's vocabulary is broader than mine, and it would have helped to have a dictionary close at hand, but stopping to look up an unfamiliar word on every other page would break the flow of the story. It's full of literary allusions, some that I recognized, and some I'm sure that I missed.

Ngaio Marsh often used theatrical settings in her novels, and her readers might enjoy this mystery. Crispin's writing is definitely earthier than Marsh, Christie or Sayers, or at least more explicit. Recommended for all classic mystery lovers. ( )

Theater companies are notorious hotbeds of intrigue, and few are more
intriguing than the company currently in residence at Oxford University.
Center-stage is the beautiful, malicious Yseut -- a mediocre actress with a
stellar talent for destroying men. Rounding out the cast are more than a
few of her past and present conquests, and the women who love them. And
watching from the wings is Professor Gervase Fen -- scholar, wit, and fop
extraordinaire -- who would infinitely rather solve crimes than expound on
English literature. When Yseut's murder touches off a series of killings,
he more than gets his wish.

A British lady I know on another forum recommended Crispin to me and this
book in particular, when we were discussing witty novels. Ordinarily, I
trust this gal's judgment on authors because we seem to have similar tastes.
But this time, I have to say this book was a real oinker. While Fen is
supposed to be "brilliant, eccentric, and rude, much taken with himself and
his splendid yellow raincoat, and given to quoting Lewis Carroll at
inappropriate occasions," I found this novel extremely hard to get
interested in. It's written in the "old school" style of murder mysteries,
but also obviously written by a man who is quite taken with his own
verbosity. My eyes kept glazing over and it took me nearly two weeks to get
all the way through! I'd have declared it a DNF and moved on, but I had
promised this lady I'd read at least one of Crispin's mysteries. Ok, I've
done that. The book gets a 1. ( )

I’m not sure why it is that the only mysteries I really like—in fact, almost my favorite kind of book when I just want a good read—are slightly archaic British mysteries, but there you have it. This is the first case of Gervase Fen, eccentric professor of English literature and amateur detective, and I had a lot of fun with it. You have to love the way that these amateur detectives seem to be surrounded by murder! (I read somewhere that per capita, Miss Marple’s hamlet of St. Mary Mead must be the murder capital of the Western hemisphere.) ( )