Swan Song cover art

Swan Song

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
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.

Swan Song

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

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

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

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

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.

©1926 Agatha Christie Ltd (P)2026 HarperCollins Publishers Amateur Sleuths Cosy Crime Crime Thrillers Detective Fiction Mystery Thriller & Suspense Traditional Detectives Thriller Funny Witty Suspense

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Thorndyke: Novels 1-4 cover art
A Man Lay Dead cover art
The Wintringham Mystery: Cicely Disappears cover art
Heads You Lose cover art
The Crime at Black Dudley cover art
These Names Make Clues cover art
A Hundred Thousand Dragons cover art
The Man in the Queue cover art
The Christmas Card Crime cover art
Footsteps in the Dark cover art
Freddy Pilkington-Soames Adventures: Books 1-3: A Case of Blackmail in Belgravia, A Case of Murder in Mayfair, A Case of Conspiracy in Clerkenwell cover art
Paul Temple Intervenes cover art
Say It With Poison, Mitchell and Markby Village, Book 1 cover art
Murder at Hawthorn Cottage cover art
The Paddington Mystery (Detective Club Crime Classics) cover art
The Secret of Chimneys 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.