Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Holy Disorders
    Unavailable
    Holy Disorders
    Unavailable
    Holy Disorders
    Audiobook8 hours

    Holy Disorders

    Written by Edmund Crispin

    Narrated by Paul Panting

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    Read the ebook instead

    About this audiobook

    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.

    Holy Disorders takes Oxford don and part time detective Gervase Fen to the town of Tolnbridge, where he is happily bounding around with a butterfly net until the cathedral organist is murdered, giving Fen the chance to play sleuth. The man didn't have an enemy in the world, and even his music was inoffensive: could he have fallen foul of a nest of German spies or of the local coven of witches, ominously rumored to have been practicing since the 17th century?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 4, 2015
    ISBN9780008124205
    Author

    Edmund Crispin

    Robert Bruce Montgomery was born in Buckinghamshire in 1921, and was a golden age crime writer as well as a successful concert pianist and composer. Under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin, he wrote 9 detective novels and 42 short stories. In addition to his reputation as a leader in the field of mystery genre, he contributed to many periodicals and newspapers and edited sci–fi anthologies. After the golden years of the 1950s he retired from the limelight to Devonshire until his death in 1978.

    Related to Holy Disorders

    Related audiobooks

    Cozy Mysteries For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Book Club

      Feb 2, 2022

      Book Club
      5 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Than Fiction

      Apr 12, 2024

      Stranger Than Fiction
      5 min read

    • Article

      Roger Lewis

      Sep 21, 2022

      Jonathan Cape £20 I don’t like novels – never have. There’s quite enough going on in the real world without making more stuff up. Ian McEwan tries to get around the stricture by putting real stuff in. Shuffled together in his new big book, therefore,

      3 min read

    • Article

      Frank’s Fable

      Mar 18, 2021

      Frank’s Fable
      4 min read

    • Article

      Retreading The City

      Nov 2, 2023

      It’s hard to pinpoint when and how inspiration strikes for a novel, but I know exactly when it did for The Detective. The Waiter and The Cook were the first two books in my Kamil Rahman thriller series about a disgraced policeman from Kolkata who co

      6 min read

    • Article

      Elegant Defender Of Lost Causes

      Oct 29, 2020

      Elegant Defender Of Lost Causes
      8 min read

    • Article

      New Zealand Books

      Jul 14, 2019

      It’s astonishing to realise on finishing this book that Marilyn Waring had been in Parliament for nine years when she retired at the age of 32. And that she developed and maintained a powerful influence on national politics in that time – and afterwa

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

      Dec 12, 2021

      As long as there are authors, translators, publishers large or small committed to the deliberate word deliberately committed to the page, and so many who still need those words on pages, legal or illegal, right, left, or center, we’ll find our feet a

      8 min read

    • Article

      Georges Clemenceau

      Aug 2, 2023

      Georges Clemenceau
      7 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Feb 19, 2021

      At a local newspaper in South East London in 1957, journalist Jean Swinney receives a curious letter written to the editor. Gretchen Tilbury – abeautiful, well-to-do woman – claims her 10-year-old daughter is the product of a virgin birth. Gretchen h

      5 min read

    • Article

      The William Trevor Reader: “The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs. Vansittart”

      Nov 3, 2022

      This story shows an author at the height of his powers, trying something he hasn't done before. The post The William Trevor Reader: “The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs. Vansittart” appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Taz-mania

      Jan 18, 2021

      Taz-mania
      3 min read

    • Article

      Roger's PROFANISAURUS

      Nov 19, 2020

      Roger's PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Four Of A Kind

      May 3, 2023

      Four Of A Kind
      4 min read

    • Article

      Chronicles of NOELLA BRY

      Jun 10, 2022

      Chronicles of NOELLA BRY
      4 min read

    • Article

      Such, Such Were The Goys

      Aug 26, 2021

      Such, Such Were The Goys
      6 min read

    • Article

      Last Portion Of Chips

      Sep 21, 2022

      Last Portion Of Chips
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Tichborne Case

      Mar 8, 2024

      The Tichborne Case
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Wisdom Of Voltaire

      Sep 7, 2022

      YEARS ago, in a happy London interlude, we lived in Covent Garden, above Rules. Over the pavement opposite, fixed to the brickwork at the back of the Vaudeville Theatre, a plaque stated that Voltaire had lived in Maiden Lane. It was 1728, and he was

      2 min read

    • Article

      When Lizzie met Maggie

      Dec 13, 2023

      The Grim Reaper has been having a high old time of late. I've barely had a moment to keep up with my diary, I have been so busy writing letters of condolence, attending funerals and giving addresses at memorial services. I was especially saddened by

      3 min read

    • Article

      LeTtERbOCKs

      Mar 7, 2024

      letters@viz.co.uk | toptips@viz.co.uk Your correspondence to VIZ editor HAMPTON DOUBLEDAY I HAVE never once seen an advertising campaign encouraging people to eat radishes, and yet there they are on every supermarket shelf in the country, just quietl

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Holy Disorders

    4/5

    151 ratings12 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      fun perspective on Anglican clergy - historical view of marijuana - wild
    • 5/5
      An absolutely superb mystery: beautifully plotted, and hysterically funny. I laughed like a drain at just about every other page, and after the raven in chapter 8 I just have to go and read some Edgar Allan Poe.Excellent. Hysterical. Go and read it.
    • 5/5
      An absolutely superb mystery: beautifully plotted, and hysterically funny. I laughed like a drain at just about every other page, and after the raven in chapter 8 I just have to go and read some Edgar Allan Poe.Excellent. Hysterical. Go and read it.
    • 5/5
      A mystery from 1940, the classic British gold age type with a map of the murder scene and the amateur detective draws up a timetable of everybody's movements and explains the crime to the police. The detective is a quirky Oxford don and this is the first in a series of at least ten. It's wartime and characters say things like "Mustn't forget to fix the blackout curtains" and mention shortages. Most of the characters are strange or unpleasant or both but the plot is nicely twisted and the writing is top notch. I felt chuffed at recognizing quotations and certainly missed a lot more, and love his habit of saying "Oh my ears and whiskers!" I immediately ordered more Gervase Fen mysteries from Powell's.
    • 3/5
      Gervase Fen and his friend, Geoffrey Vintner, are in the town of Tolnbridge where shenanigans are afoot and church organists are dropping left and right. In fact, Vintner nearly becomes a fatality on the way to join Fen. An amusing mystery, with many literary allusions, the mystery itself is pretty good, although solvable, I missed some of the clues which told me why I was correct. Probably because I was skimming the parts which annoyed me. The characters didn't seem consistent, and their moods and temperaments were difficult to justify. Also, similar weird names left me befuddled because the ones which bore them had no special characteristics to set them apart. In spite of all that, it was an enjoyable read, but I won't be seeking out more Crispin novels to read.
    • 3/5
      There have been some rather untoward goings-on in the organ loft of a West Country cathedral, and church-music composer Geoffrey Vintner finds himself playing Watson to the tetchy Professor Gervase Fen's Holmes as they try to disentangle an increasingly complex plot. There's a great deal of silliness, most of it fun but quite irrelevant to the crime, as well as bucketloads of allusions to both serious and light literature. However, it's a bit disconcerting to find that Crispin can't quite make up his mind whether he's writing a lurid thriller or the kind of English detective story that relies on the reader keeping track of the movements of a whole chapter of clergy to the nearest minute and understanding the significance of a 32' organ stop: there's nothing really wrong with mixing the two subgenres, you just don't quite expect it...
    • 3/5
      Didn't finish this one. Seems fun, but lost interest.
    • 2/5
      Although I seem to recall having enjoyed the earlier work by Crispin, this novel forcefully reminds me why the Golden Age penchant for eccentric private detectives and incredible plots went out of style. Not quite a murder with a rare dagger at the precise time the soprano hits high C, but close in execution and explanation. (Yes, I mangled the Chandler reference.)
    • 5/5
      An absolutely superb mystery: beautifully plotted, and hysterically funny. I laughed like a drain at just about every other page, and after the raven in chapter 8 I just have to go and read some Edgar Allan Poe.Excellent. Hysterical. Go and read it.
    • 3/5
      This continues to be an amusing series for me although this entry is more of a “puzzle” mystery than a comedy. This story is set in a Cathedral Town and one of the pleasures of Crispin’s novels is his wonderful descriptive writing. I caught the clue that pointed to the main villain but there were enough other threads to the story to hold my interest. Crispin’s self references are amusing and his POV is interesting. In the two mysteries I’ve read the story is told in third person but the POV is mainly through the eyes of the “Watson” character—in both cases this has been a friend who has come to visit Fen. We learn much more about the friend than we do about Fen—who seems to be a rather “stock” character in some ways. I find this series a relaxing read to while away a few hours—enjoyable but not compelling. However, I do plan to read the third one in the omnibus I borrowed from the library because sometimes “relaxing and amusing” is definitely the way to go.
    • 4/5
      An extremely enjoyable detective novel, combining the typical twists and turns, moments of comedy, and in the case of Gervase Fen, a vocabulary bordering on the gargantuan. Have a dictionary to hand. Be warned, too, that this book is extremely pretentious. The joke about Gibbon and Waugh made me laugh, but perhaps others will be less than impressed.
    • 4/5
      More somber than some Gervase Fen books due to the war background and the witchcraft theme. I always enjoy Crispin's writing.