Swan Song. Edmund Crispin
EDMUND CRISPIN
Swan Song
COLLINS CRIME CLUB
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1947
Copyright © Rights Limited 1947
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 / Cover image: © NRM/Pictorial Collection/Science and Society Picture Library - All rights reserved.
Edmund Crispin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008228033
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008228040
Version: 2018-01-11
TO
GODFREY SAMPSON
My dear Godfrey,
You’re not, I fancy, an habitual reader of such murderous tales as this, and in the ordinary way I should be decidedly shy of dedicating one of them to you. But a book with a background of Die Meistersinger – well, what else could I do? It was you who first introduced me to that noble work (in the days when the sum of my musical activity consisted in trying to evade piano lessons), and our mutual admiration of it is not the least of the many bonds of friendship between us. Accept the story, then, for the sake of its setting, and as a foretaste of the day when Wagner’s masterpiece returns to Covent Garden – without, let us hope, any of the dismal impediments which beset it in the following pages.
Yours as ever,
E. C.
Devon, 1946
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