Love Lies Bleeding is a detective novel by Edmund Crispin, first published in 1948. Set in the post-war period in and around a public school in the vicinity of Stratford-upon-Avon, it is about the accidental discovery of old manuscripts which contain Shakespeare's long-lost play, Love's Labour's Won, and the subsequent hunt for those manuscripts, in the course of which several people are murdered. Collaborating with the local police, Oxford don Gervase Fen, a professor of English who happens to be the guest of honour at the school's Speech Day, can solve the case at the same weekend.
References
Barry Forshaw: The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (London, 2007) 24f., where Love Lies Bleeding is mentioned as a prime example of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction ("generally felt to be a key outing for the detective [...] handled in prose of quiet and unspectacular skill, with a brilliantly created cloistered world at its centre").
Bibliography Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015. Whittle, David. Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books. Routledge, 2017.
External links Love Lies Bleeding at the Golden Age of Detection Wiki