Up-and-coming playwright Robert Warner has chosen a local repertory theatre for the première of his new play and has arrived with his leading lady (and mistress) Rachel West.

Yseut's promiscuous lifestyle has gained her many enemies, and she has difficulty acknowledging the fact that, about a year earlier, it had been Warner rather than she who had ended their brief affair.

Also arriving at Oxford are Nigel Blake, a former student of Fen's now working as a journalist; Nicholas Barclay, a university drop-out of independent means in search of the good life; Donald Fellowes, organist and choirmaster at St Christopher's College who is hopelessly infatuated with Yseut; and Jean Whitelegge, secretary of the theatre club who is attracted to Fellowes.

[6] The novel was first published by Victor Gollancz in the UK in 1944[1] and was released a year later by Lippincott in the United States under the title Obsequies at Oxford.

[7] Reviewing the 1969 reissue for The Times, HRF Keating described the novel as less good than Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, "being rather too much bogged down with the mechanics of suspicion-casting to achieve total elan".

[9] Crispin's Times obituary of 1978 detected within The Case of the Gilded Fly the influence of his favourite authors John Dickson Carr, Gladys Mitchell and Michael Innes together with – in his own words – "a dash of Evelyn Waugh".