Poor Gervase Fen. Invited down to his friend’s school – where the friend is headmaster – to fill in with a graduation speech for someone who had a last minute emergency, all he wants to do is get out of Oxford for a break in the beautiful country outside Stratford-on-Avon, give his speech, and regale his old friend with the plot of his latest book.

But no, no, no, no.

First, a schoolmaster is killed on-campus and, almost at the same time, an elderly teacher is murdered at his nearby home. The schoolmaster was grading tests in a room hot both naturally (is a sweltering summer night) and with a space heater turned on, to boot. Why would he do that? The elderly man is found in his home office, where he had been writing a letter to the headmaster, accusing somebody of something – but very vague and cut off before he could jot down the specifics.

And then an old woman is murdered in her un-charmingly historic hovel. A passing hiker witnesses it from the walking path nearby, dashes in, and gets knocked out for his pains. Luckily his injuries are slight and he is able to walk into the nearby hamlet and raise the alarm, meeting, on the way, a beautiful young woman who was sunbathing in a bikini. Gervase Fen becomes interested and discovers that the old lady’s cottage dates back to the time of Shakespeare, and that she had recently discovered a literary treasure under the kitchen hearthstones – a treasure which is now missing.

How do all these murders tie together – and what about the high school girl who disappeared, along with a bottle of acid from the chemistry lab at the boy’s school that Fen is visiting.

This is one of my favorite Gervase Fen books and my copy – a green-and-white Penguin, purchased used – is literally falling apart. I love Crispin’s silly sense of humor. When he describes Fen’s graduation speech, he says he spoke humorously and un-improvingly for precisely 5 minutes, winning the gratitude of everyone present. Characters wax lyrically about the importance of cherishing eccentric professors at otherwise conventionally normal schools. The headmaster – faced with evidence that a teenaged boy had been planning to meet a teenaged girl at night in an empty classroom – calls him onto the mat, and in a calculated way, persuades the boy to wait to have premarital sex until after he graduates and is no longer under the headmaster’s purview. So funny.

I enjoy Gervase Fen novels. They’re clever. Fen is an unlikely hero, insouciant, self-centered, clever, and – when required – physically brave. He’s not a Superintendent Jury, Peter Whimsey, Albert Campion, or Roderick Alleyn that a reader might fall in love with. He’s not a Papa Poirot, calling you Mon Cher, and quietly solving your crime.

If you haven’t tried a Fen, try this one.