Swan Song cover art

Swan Song

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Swan Song

By: Edmund Crispin
Narrated by: Paul Panting
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

As inventive as Agatha Christie, as hilarious as P.G. Wodehouse – discover the delightful detective stories of Edmund Crispin. Crime fiction at its quirkiest and best.

When an opera company gathers in Oxford for the first post-war production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger its happiness is soon soured by the discovery that the unpleasant Edwin Shorthouse will be singing a leading role. Nearly everyone involved has reason to loathe Shorthouse but who amongst them has the fiendish ingenuity to kill him in his own locked dressing room?

In the course of this entertaining adventure, eccentric Oxford don and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen has to unravel two murders, cope with the unpredictability of the artistic temperament, and attempt to encourage the course of true love.

©1947 Edmund Crispin (P)2019 HarperCollins Publishers Amateur Sleuths Cosy Crime Thrillers Detective Fiction Mystery Thriller & Suspense Traditional Detectives Thriller Funny Witty Suspense

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The D'Arblay Mystery cover art
A Man Lay Dead cover art
Death of an Author cover art
The Wintringham Mystery cover art
Heads You Lose cover art
The Crime at Black Dudley cover art
The Theft of the Iron Dogs cover art
The White Priory Murders cover art
A Certain Dr Thorndyke cover art
Thorndyke: Novels 1-4 cover art
These Names Make Clues cover art
A Hundred Thousand Dragons cover art
The Man in the Queue cover art
Fell Murder cover art
The Christmas Card Crime cover art
Footsteps in the Dark cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Paul Panting reads this rather well, but it is quite frankly disgraceful that he has been so badly let down by his producers. It’s not up to him, it’s up to them to check up on how words are pronounced. So in a novel which is set entirely during a production of a Wagner opera, nobody has bothered to find out how “Bayreuth” is pronounced, &
we are left with the impression that it’s somewhere in the Middle East. The mispronunciations are so frequent and so distracting that it comes as a shock, and another distraction, when he occasionally pronounces a long word correctly. (And Crispin loves long words.)

A decent performance let down by shocking production.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It is so disappointing when the narrator cannot be bothered to look up important names and this narrator pronounced so many words wrong I could not finish the book. Der Rosenkavalier, motif, Beyreuth, Laocoon and so on horribly mangled.

Spoiled by narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.