Robert Bruce Montgomery was born in Buckinghamshire in 1921, and was a golden age crime writer as well as a successful concert pianist and composer. Under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin, he wrote 9 detective novels and 42 short stories. In addition to his reputation as a leader in the field of mystery genre, he contributed to many periodicals and newspapers and edited sci-fi anthologies. After the golden years of the 1950s he retired from the limelight to Devonshire until his death in 1978.