Bruce Montgomery (1921-78) was a composer and author. If you’ve watched films of the 1950s and 1960s, including the early Carry Ons and the series started by Doctor in the House, you will have heard his music, and aficionados of classic crime fiction still enjoy the witty novels and short stories of Edmund Crispin, his pseudonym.
Montgomery read Modern Languages at Oxford, where friendships began with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Initially terrified by his apparent sophistication (whereas they went to the pub for beer, Montgomery stomped off to the bar of the Randolph Hotel to drink spirits), Larkin soon found that ‘Beneath this formidable exterior … Bruce had unsuspected depths of frivolity, and we were soon spending most of our time together swaying about with laughter on bar-stools.’
Montgomery’s career took off quickly. At Oxford, he wrote The Case of the Gilded Fly, published in 1944, as was his first music. The next decade saw most of his concert works and all but one of his novels. His music is distinctive, the largest-scale piece being An Oxford Requiem, performed by the Oxford Bach Choir and the LSO in 1951.
The novels are equally distinctive, full of humour, chases and memorable characters. His detective, Professor Gervase Fen, is donnish, eccentric and waspish. The Moving Toyshop is generally considered his best.
Soon Montgomery found that film scores paid ‘better than books and consequently appeal to my innate instinct for getting relatively large sums of money in return for absolutely small amounts of work’. Montgomery composed scores for 40 films. Carry On Sergeant (1958) had a title tune ‘a not very intelligent Army bandmaster might have written round about 1900’. His zenith was writing the story, screenplay and score for Raising the Wind (1961), a music-college version of Doctor in the House.
Heavy drinking led to Montgomery’s being dropped by the film world. Becoming a financially strapped semi-recluse at his Devon bungalow, he smoked heavily and developed osteoporosis (‘the bonelessness of the short-distance funner’), leading to frequent stays in hospital. During these years, he edited influential anthologies of science fiction and was crime-fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times.
His first novel since 1951, The Glimpses of the Moon, appeared in 1977. Detection takes second place to comedy, a host of ridiculous characters and bizarre events; it was welcomed by those who had missed his literary high spirits. Montgomery died in 1978, at 56.
The official cause of death was heart failure, but he had long been cirrhotic.
In 1956, Montgomery wrote to Larkin, ‘What with Kingsley becoming a prominent literary figure, and now you, I feel like an ageing hare overtaken by squads of implacable tortoises.’ This erudite man harboured doubts about the worth of the fields he worked in. In cricketing terms he was a gentleman and amateur. He fell into his careers as composer and author, and when they became too much like hard work, he resorted to the bottle.
Rather than dwelling on the sad end to his life, though, we should celebrate the pleasure he left behind.
David Whittle
