The Case of the Gilded Fly
1944 novel by Edmund Crispin
The Case of the Gilded Fly is a locked-room mystery by the English author Edmund Crispin (Bruce Montgomery), written while Crispin was an undergraduate at Oxford and first published in the UK in 1944. It was published in the US a year later under the title Obsequies at Oxford.
Crispin's debut novel, the book contains the first appearance of eccentric amateur detective Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, who went on to appear in all nine of Crispin's novels as well as most of the short stories. The book abounds in literary allusions ranging from classical antiquity to the mid-20th century.
Title
The novel's title references Shakespeare's King Lear: "the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight".
Plot
The novel is set in Oxford in October 1940. Up-and-coming playwright Robert Warner has chosen a local repertory theatre for the première of his new play and has arrived with his leading lady (and mistress) Rachel West. Also in the cast are Yseut Haskell, in her mid-twenties, and her quiet half-sister Helen. Yseut's promiscuous lifestyle has gained her many enemies, and she has difficulty acknowledging the fact that, about a year earlier, it had been Warner rather than she who had ended their brief affair.
Also arriving at Oxford are Nigel Blake, a former student of Fen's now working as a journalist; Nicholas Barclay, a university drop-out of independent means in search of the good life; Donald Fellowes, organist and choirmaster at St Christopher's College who is hopelessly infatuated with Yseut; and Jean Whitelegge, secretary of the theatre club who is attracted to Fellowes.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Case of the Gilded Fly” as 1944 novel by Edmund Crispin. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1944 novel by Edmund Crispin. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7721519. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944 and 1940.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Case of the Gilded Fly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.