The Doctor is Sick is one of four novels written by Anthony Burgess during his 1960 annus mirabilis, shortly after receiving a (later rescinded) sentence of death from his doctors. I haven't read the Lehmann book or much of Elizabeth Bowen beyond her short stories, but the others seem quite inspired to me.

They're not all obvious choices by any means.

Volume One: The Great Fortune / Volume Two: The Spoilt City / Volume Three: Friends and Heroes. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. In strictly alphabetical order, reference is being made to: It's as if he can't quite bring himself ever to forget the morality of the spectacle he's creating, however frivolously it may be framed. His victims are not the cardboard cut-outs of an Agatha Christie or even a Dorothy Sayers, but living, breathing people, whose brutal deaths leave a gap in the world. I've sometimes wondered if it's connected to Crispin's unusual focus on the consequences of crime. I don't know if this was intentional or not. His age seems fixed around 40, regardless of what year it is, and his Academic position at Oxford remains essentially unchanged throughout. It's almost as if the more we hear about him, the less there he is. On the contrary, as I read my way through the books as a teenager, I was struck by how well portrayed and accurately placed most of the other people are, and how bizarrely unfocussed is Fen. Not that Fen is a well-developed character. One of things that interests me most about the Montgomery / Crispin books is Gervase Fen himself.

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