Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.
I’m featuring The Case of the Golded Fly by Edmund Crispin, a Gervase Fen Mystery, one of my TBRs – a locked room mystery, first published in 1944.
Book Beginning:
Prologue in Railway Trains
To the unwary traveller, Didcot signifies the imminence of his arrival at Oxford; to the more experienced, another half-hour at least of frustration.
Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.
Page 56:
In the big entrance hall, lit only by a single bulb in the roof, the night porter dozed uncomfortably in his box and so failed to see either the person who flitted silently up the big staircase to Peter Graham’s room, or what that person was carrying out on its return.
Description from Amazon:
The very first case for Oxford-based sleuth Gervase Fen, one of the last of the great Golden Age detectives. As inventive as Agatha Christie, as hilarious as P.G. Wodehouse, this is the perfect entry point to discover the delightful detective stories of Edmund Crispin – crime fiction at its quirkiest and best.
A pretty but spiteful young actress with a talent for destroying men’s lives is found dead in a college room just yards from the office of the unconventional Oxford don Gervase Fen. Anyone who knew the girl would gladly have shot her, but can Fen discover who did shoot her, and why?
Published during the Second World War, The Case of the Gilded Fly introduced English professor and would-be detective Gervase Fen, one of crime fiction’s most irrepressible and popular sleuths. A classic locked-room mystery filled with witty literary allusions, it was the debut of ‘a new writer who calls himself Edmund Crispin’ (in reality the choral and film composer Bruce Montgomery), later described by The Times as ‘One of the last exponents of the classical English detective story . . . elegant, literate, and funny.’
~~~
What do you think, does it appeal to you? What are you currently reading?
BooksPlease 