''Love Lies Bleeding'' is a
detective novel
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as s ...
by
Edmund Crispin
Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery (usually credited as Bruce Montgomery) (2 October 1921 – 15 September 1978), an English crime writer and composer known for his Gervase Fen novels and for his musical scores for ...
, first published in
1948. Set in the post-war period in and around a
public school in the vicinity of
Stratford-upon-Avon, it is about the accidental discovery of old manuscripts which contain
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
's long-lost play, ''
Love's Labour's Won
''Love's Labour's Won'' is a lost play attributed by contemporaries to William Shakespeare, written before 1598 and published by 1603, though no copies are known to have survived. Scholars dispute whether it is a true lost work, possibly a sequ ...
'', and the subsequent hunt for those manuscripts, in the course of which several people are murdered. Collaborating with the local police,
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
don
Gervase Fen
Gervase Fen is a fictional amateur detective and Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature created by Edmund Crispin. Fen appears in nine novels and two books of short stories published between 1944 and 1979. Fen is an unconventional de ...
, a professor of English who happens to be the guest of honour at the school's Speech Day, can solve the case at the same weekend.
See also
*
School and university in literature
Educational settings as place and/or subject in fiction form the theme of this catalogue of titles and authors. Organized alphabetically by the author's last name, the information is further divided by general school environments and those where th ...
References
*
Barry Forshaw
Barry Forshaw is a writer, broadcaster and journalist whose books include '' British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia'', '' The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction'', '' Brit Noir'', '' British Gothic Cinema'', ''Nordic Noir'', '' Sex and Film'', '' Euro N ...
: ''
The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction'' (London, 2007) 24f., where ''Love Lies Bleeding'' is mentioned as a prime example of the
Golden Age of Detective Fiction
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction was an era of classic murder mystery novels of similar patterns and styles, predominantly in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Golden Age proper is, in practice, usually taken to refer to a type of fiction which was pre ...
("generally felt to be a key outing for the detective
..handled in prose of quiet and unspectacular skill, with a brilliantly created cloistered world at its centre").
Bibliography
* Reilly, John M. ''Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers''. Springer, 2015.
* Whittle, David. ''Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books''. Routledge, 2017.
External links
''Love Lies Bleeding''at the ''Golden Age of Detection Wiki''
1948 British novels
British detective novels
British mystery novels
Novels by Edmund Crispin
Novels set in Warwickshire
J. B. Lippincott & Co. books
Campus novels
Victor Gollancz Ltd books
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