An impossible crime, hints of devil worship and the supernatural, a meet-cute between Geoffrey and an attractive young lady, and at one point the characters read the historical diary of a sadistic witchfinder. It all sounds very John Dickson Carr – specifically the early ones, like Hag’s Nook. It’s clear that Crispin is once again paying homage to his mystery writing hero.
However, this supernatural intrigue also has to co-exist with a spy-hunting plot, and it’s an odd fit. It brings into the mix a “criminal conspiracy” aspect that can often prove unsatisfying in a whodunnit. This is not wholly the case here – one member of the group does get special focus in terms of the drama of their reveal. But Fen’s detective group also builds up a lot of members. There’s Fen, Inspector Garratt, Geoffrey, and then the Watson to the Watson, Henry Fielding, who mostly hangs around uselessly after his initial heroism. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the number of characters had more to do with the practicalities of the action scenes than any inherent interest in the characters.

In fact, the bits of the book that aren’t Carrian homage and spycatching act instead like a dry-run of the madcap chase in The Moving Toyshop, where Fen and a hapless friend gradually gather a bundle of hangers-on in their efforts to track down a group of criminals. Though here Crispin seems to be aiming more for actual thriller-style scenes and real peril. The action is written pretty well, but it’s a bit of a whiplash turn – tonal shifts aren’t uncommon in Crispin’s fiction, but there’s so many different tones here that the effect doesn’t really come off, there’s not that sharp contrast between light comedy and darkness.

As for the comedy itself, I found it wasn’t entirely successful. There are some good comedic moments, but I got the impression that Crispin was getting bored with his detective story and wanted to insert humourous literary references to keep himself entertained, such as a chapter full of Poe references, or a Lewis Carroll-quoting professor briefly joining the Scooby Gang. The Poe scene was pretty funny – at least until Crispin explained the joke at the end…
Fen’s behaviour was the book’s least hilarious hilarity; I get it, he’s almost a parody of the eccentric genius amateur, but actually he just acts like an arsehole most of the time. Fen’s renegade nature was another aspect that worked better in The Moving Toyshop. That said, he doesn’t appear in the first few chapters of the book at all, and I was desperate for him to show up. Full admission – this was actually my third attempt to read Holy Disorders, my first two having sputtered out in the waiting-for-Gervase section.

The other characters are mostly involved in the church in some way, so I had a hard time separating them at the start, but they’re actually extremely distinctly drawn; unfortunately the book is structured so that Fen talks to each of them in turn, and then they disappear after that chapter. Looking back I’m not sure how many of these scenes were even necessary for the main plot.
Sidekick Geoffrey is a bit of a wet blanket, which even the narration remarks on at times, and I was not at all invested in his budding romance with the precentor’s daughter Frances Butler. The incredibly pessimistic police Inspector is better – “He reeled off the list with the melancholy relish of a Satanist enumerating the circles of inferno” – but he’s not in it much.

I should probably get on to talking about some positive things. The impossible crime has a great, atmospheric set-up, and the solution is both novel and ties in well to the book as a whole. Unfortunately we don’t actually spend much time on that, what with the whole spies thing. Fen does do a bit of good detection – just look at the scene where he demystifies the eldritch atmosphere of a cryptic “dying message”.
The atmosphere of Tolnbridge is also well done; the nighttime sequence where the characters all rush to the cathedral to check on the person inside is an early highlight, as are the gorse-covered clifftops. Crispin’s writing always delivers with witty lines and intriguing turns of phrase. And it is genuinely unsettling at times.

However on the scale of the book as a whole, things are on pretty shaky ground. The spread of genres and tones – horror, comedy, mystery, spy thriller – doesn’t make for a focused book, and it doesn’t excel at any of these aspects. There’s signs of boredom on Crispin’s part, which can hardly bode well for the reader, who might enjoy the distractions while they last, only to find the plot is still as tangled as ever. Fen is particularly unpleasant company here, and the other characters don’t make up for it. While it does have a good impossibility, some decent clues, and moments of excellent writing, this is my least favourite book of Crispin’s I’ve read so far.
It’s interesting to compare this to the short stories I recently reviewed. As JJ suggested in his review of a short story collection, when Crispin writes short stories, all of his brilliance gets focused on one single compact idea, and he can create a fantastic (and consistent) story. Those creative turns of phrase make more of an impression in a short story. In a novel, he gets distracted and can’t quite marshal all his ideas to give them their full impact. But I’m sure that the unbounded chaos of the novels is very much what some people are after, even if it doesn’t work so well for me.

Other opinions:

Clothes in Books
crossexaminingcrime
Do you write under your own name?
The Grandest Game in the World
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
A Window Through Time