Swan Song

Swan Song
Edmund Crispin

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.When an opera company gathers in Oxford for the first post-war production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger its happiness is soon soured by the discovery that the unpleasant Edwin Shorthouse will be singing a leading role. Nearly everyone involved has reason to loathe Shorthouse but who amongst them has the fiendish ingenuity to kill him in his own locked dressing room?In the course of this entertaining adventure, eccentric Oxford don and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen has to unravel two murders, cope with the unpredictability of the artistic temperament, and attempt to encourage the course of true love.

EDMUND CRISPIN

Swan Song

Copyright (#u14a58352-2f2d-5454-9030-6e1750ae22f6)

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1947

Copyright © Rights Limited 1947

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2018 / Cover image: © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science and Society Picture Library - All rights reserved.

Edmund Crispin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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 author’s 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: 9780008228033

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008228040

Version: 2018-01-11

TO

GODFREY SAMPSON

My dear Godfrey,

You’re not, I fancy, an habitual reader of such murderous tales as this, and in the ordinary way I should be decidedly shy of dedicating one of them to you. But a book with a background of Die Meistersinger – well, what else could I do? It was you who first introduced me to that noble work (in the days when the sum of my musical activity consisted in trying to evade piano lessons), and our mutual admiration of it is not the least of the many bonds of friendship between us. Accept the story, then, for the sake of its setting, and as a foretaste of the day when Wagner’s masterpiece returns to Covent Garden – without, let us hope, any of the dismal impediments which beset it in the following pages.

Yours as ever,

E. C.

Devon, 1946

Table of Contents

Cover (#ub45fb972-9d61-5657-bba9-12df0da25998)

Title Page (#uf2e1b8c3-647b-5df6-9ee1-ac1732c34757)

Copyright (#u6060c370-95da-51a6-bcb1-35091383a0e7)

Dedication (#uf1612b07-03e1-5f94-b4ac-e29240b2ac64)

Chapter One (#u333b16c9-1289-5941-822e-419fd145121f)

Chapter Two (#u1a7f7ba9-a084-5543-ace2-0c14f71e7646)

Chapter Three (#ue0797da0-24a5-5ae5-b8a5-9d9ae36272a5)

Chapter Four (#u34b2fb19-3b2f-5fcf-ac6a-6552bace1451)

Chapter Five (#uaa94e7a9-9aac-537c-9142-81918c887969)

Chapter Six (#ud26e5c2b-ac0d-567e-bfe3-fd08492f2577)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)