Introduction

Abstract

In his 1944 novel, The Case of the Gilded Fly, Edmund Crispin interrupts what is a conventional detective story set in St. Christopher’s, a fictitious Oxford college, to embark on a Jamesian ghost story. In true Monty James style and the oral tradition, as the assembled company of detectives and academics sit around, one of the dons suddenly launches into a spooky tale concerning the history of the college. The narrative, which has elements of James’s ecclesiastical stories, ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ (1911) and ‘An Episode in Cathedral History’ (1919), concerns the martyrdom of a student from the sixteenth century for his support of the Reformation. While the college chapel is being altered, a stone with the inscription, cave ne exeat, ‘don’t let it get out’ — a singularly Jamesian sentiment — is found; this disturbance releases the ghost of the martyr who seeks out the current organist and murders him. The original organist had been the leader of those who persecuted the martyr.¹ This remarkable passage appears to have no bearing upon the plot of the detective story at all; aside from the collegiate and ecclesiastical setting and the obvious reference to James, the whole exercise seems gratuitous. When I read this, it was the casual audacity of such an intervention that was so striking; there was, it seems, no barrier to interrupting a detective story in this way.