Crispin, Edmund - Frequent Hearses / Sudden Vengeance (1950)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

'It's nothing but a poem. Poems haven't got anything to do with what happens in real life.'

What is it with film studios and detective stories by otherwise good authors? John Dickson Carr’s And So to Murder (1940) was also set in a film-studio — and was one of his very worst stories. Frequent Hearses is not much better. Both authors obviously spent more time on the film studio background than on the plots of their particular novels. Despite an unusual poison used to bump off the murders of the clichéd ghastly film family, “all deplorable in one way or another”, the plot is bad: the criminal appears in one scene at the beginning of the book, and never appears again. Although Crispin’s plots are often secondary compared to the humour and telling of the story, there was no need to devise something of this mundaneness. Professor Fen, Pope expert to the studio, is in the background for most of the tale, and so does not shine. The characters, with the exception of the heroine Judith Haynes, are all cardboard; and the much-touted maze scene is a reworking of a similar scene in the far superior Love Lies Bleeding. For completists only.