Ah, back to mysteries. I’m trying to pace myself here, I promise you. I just own a lot of mysteries, so they’re going to keep showing up in my posts.

Have you ever read any Edmund Crispin? He was a British writer, who wrote during the golden age. His detective, Gervase Fen, is an Oxford Professor of Literature, who avoids working as much as possible, preferring to solve mysteries. He often crops up unexpectedly in a community, not invited in by the local police, sometimes in a disguise that fools no one (he is partial to disguises). At the end of the mystery, he holds court in the traditional manner, recounting the whole mystery and how he solved it – only no one wants to hear it and people tend to wander off.

In this book, he is actually in town to run for a seat in Parliament. Why does he want to do this? Apparently he’s bored. He takes up residence in an inn that the owner is do-it-yourself remodeling with his large family. “We’ve got to take that beam away from the ceiling,” the innkeeper says but when Fen ventures, “I think, you know, that might be a rather dangerous thing to do. The beam is probably an organic part of the house’s structure,” the landlord dismisses his concerns with predictable results.

In this book, Fen encounters: a female taxi driver (novel in those days), and the young peer she loves – who adopted socialism at university, to the distress of his servants – who is too bashful to admit his love; a mysterious woman with an unplaceable accent, who appears to be stalking the peer; a mystery writer who Fen meets while the writer is acting out the murder in his latest book, and who is crushing on the Marilyn-Monroe-esque barmaid who works at the Inn where Fen is staying. The other barmaid at the hotel is pursued with unwilling devotion by a small pig and a Cold-Comfort-Farmish farmer. Fen also encounters a vicar whose vicarage is haunted by a poltergeist. And, to Fen’s surprise, he also meets up with a Scotland Yard detective, undercover, in pursuit of a blackmailer turned murderer.

Who then gets murdered. (The Scotland Yard detective, I mean.)

So, of course, Fen has to figure out who did it.

He is hampered in this by Major Watkins, the local party fixer, whose fixed purpose is to help Fen get elected by making him ride around in a malfunctioning loud-speaker van, promoting himself to his disinterested constituents, interview reporters, and speak to bored rallies; and by an escaped lunatic who is persuaded he is Woodrow Wilson, and is running around naked except for a pair of pince-nez; and a psychologist who is determined to make Fen help him get a job at Oxford. Fen is assisted by Humbleby, a Scotland Yard detective who is a regular in Crispin’s books, and who would prefer to be a Professor of Literature.

As you can imagine, madness ensues, replete with car chases, poltergeists hurling objects from vicarage windows, a murderer racing onto a roof, and Fen managing to narrowly escape being sent to Parliament by the skin of his teeth and a misplaced decimal point.

I tend to like crazy mysteries, the zanier, the more wacky characters to distract from the pursuit of the murderer, the better. Because, as I have said before, mysteries are, for me, about sense-making of the world. Scary things happen, clues and suspects abound, just as you think you’ve figured out who did it, they get murdered, then someone else gets murdered – why? what did they have to do with it? – and then suddenly something pings, and the lightbulb goes on above the detectives head. There’s a brief flurry of apprehension, and then the detective sits back and reflects on his journey.

And it all makes sense.

Just like what I do everyday at work, only replace murders with boring business mysteries. As Niki Nymark’s poem says, “There have been no dragons in my life, only small spiders and stepping in gum…  I could have coped with dragons.”

I think my purpose in life is to make sense of things.

It’s a purpose I may never achieve.