One of the sorrows of my fiction-reading life is that Edmund Crispin ceased recounting the immensely witty and literate adventures of Oxford don Gervase Fen … after but eight novels and a collection of short stories. And so if I indicate that I had been searching with some degree of diligence but no success for a copy of the only Crispin book still lacking from my library, "The Case of the Gilded Fly," you will appreciate my pleasure on finding it reissued…. This is the first case for Professor Fen, who describes himself modestly as "the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction." (For balance we also have a policeman who fancies himself unexcelled in literary criticism.) A famed London playwright comes to Oxford to try out his latest highly experimental drama in the college repertory theater. An actress—a former mistress of the playwright, and unloved by all—is done in under circumstances consistent neither with accident, suicide or murder, and it's up to Fen to sort it out. And all the while Crispin is at his prime, lovingly assembling the words of the Queen's English in freshly expressive ranks.