‘Edmund Crispin’ was born Bruce Montgomery; and as a composer (chiefly of film music) he has stayed that way. The pseudonym was adopted in the faith that one day he would need his real name for writing ‘serious’ books. He has found, however, that for the author detective fiction is technically a very ‘serious’ business indeed: so absorbing, in fact that his debut in the other forms of literature now seems likely to be postponed indefinitely.

For the rest, he is thirty-one years old, unmarried, constitutionally torpid; for recreation he does crossword puzzles, reads, and sleeps. Unlike most authors, he has not been a lumber-jack, bar-tender, advertising agent, ship’s cat, lecturer in metallurgy, gigolo, and Member of Parliament. For a time after leaving Oxford he was, however, a schoolmaster; and it is to this period of his life that he attributes his knowledge of human nature in general and criminal human nature in particular.

Are there any more?