Gervase Fen Books in Order

During rehearsals for a new play in wartime Oxford, a glamorous actress with enemies everywhere is found shot in what looks like an impossible crime. Fen's first case mixes theater intrigue, jealousy, and a classic locked-room puzzle.

Fen plans a peaceful holiday in the cathedral town of Tolnbridge, but attacks on church musicians draw him into a strange case. Witchcraft rumors, wartime nerves, and espionage all swirl around a mystery that grows deadlier by the page.

Poet Richard Cadogan comes to Oxford for a break and stumbles into a toyshop where he finds a corpse. By morning the body is gone, the shop has become a grocery, and Fen is chasing one of classic crime's happiest impossible mysteries.

An opera company arrives in Oxford to stage Wagner, and almost everyone has a reason to hate one of its singers. When he is found dead in a locked dressing room, Fen must untangle artistic rivalries and another looming murder.

Fen impulsively runs for Parliament in a rural by-election and lands in a village already simmering with blackmail, secrets, and odd local characters. Then a murder cuts through the farce, and his campaign turns into a full detective case.

Invited to a school's Speech Day, Fen walks into assaults, thefts, and murder. What begins as small disturbances around Castrevenford soon turns into a clever hunt involving hidden motives and the possible discovery of a lost Shakespeare play.

At a film studio, the apparent suicide of an ambitious young actress is followed by poison and another killing. Fen works through backstage rivalries, family tensions, and show-business gossip to uncover a carefully staged revenge plot.

Anonymous poison-pen letters start tearing through the village of Cotten Abbas, and Fen investigates under cover. When one scandal leads to suicide and then murder, the case becomes far darker than village gossip first suggests.

Fen heads to Devon for a quiet stretch of work and finds the village of Aller thrown into panic by a decapitated head in the river. The investigation widens into a macabre mystery full of gossip, false trails, and black comedy.

This posthumous volume gathers 26 short mysteries and darker tales, many featuring Gervase Fen and Inspector Humbleby. The fun is in the odd clues, brisk fair-play setups, and Crispin's blend of wit, menace, and literary mischief.