THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

Verging on parody, Crispin's first full-length work seen here in some time will delight only those who'd rather smile than tremble: the English village is back with a vengeance, replete with dialect, digressions, eccentrics, and literate foolishness. A repulsive laborer named Hagberd has been arrested for coshing and decapitating an even more repulsive, animal-torturing farmer named Routh, but droll Professor Fen and a visiting hack writer and the dotty Major (who sings telly commercials) discover--via the truly idiotic village idiot--that Hagberd had an alibi. Then they hear about the recent, suspicious death-fall of an adulteress about town. And, before they've had time to investigate fully, another torso materializes--in the Botticelli tent at the Church fete--with the matching head turning up in the sack that Fen's been lugging around (he thought he had a pig's head in there). And so on, with hilarious inventions that stay just barely on the right side of giddiness, and, by the by, some very sound deduction. A throwback, to be sure, but an irresistible one for Anglophiles, Crispinphiles, and fans of thinking man's vaudeville.