The Moving Toyshop

The Moving Toyshop takes the classic puzzle of the locked room and turns it inside out. A struggling poet, defeated one stormy night by British Railway's unfathomable time-tables, takes shelter in an old toyshop, only to stumble upon the body of a woman inside. But when he returns there with the police, the toyshop has gone and in its place is a grocery shop. It sounds like a story from Ray Bradbury, but this mystery is caused by very common human greed. Edmund Crispin was the pen-name of composer Bruce Montgomery. British movie fans will recognize his name as the creator of the music for the Carry On comedy series. Crispin is one of the mystery writers from the Golden Age of mystery fiction between the wars whose works have stood the test of time. It's a pity that so many of them are currently out of print. Where American writers specialized in hard-boiled detectives, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Dashiel Hammett's Sam Spade, the British fiction of the period preferred its heroes to be languid, educated and world-weary. It goes without saying that they spoke several languages, including French and Latin, were familiar with classical music and literature, and hedonistically fond of cigarettes, whisky and good port. The Moving Toyshop has remained a favourite of classical mystery fiction fans, because it incorporates all of the best features of its genre. The amateur detective is Gervase Fen, a disarmingly eccentric professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University. The narrator in this story is a querulous, but biddable poet, a cross between Conan Doyle's Dr Watson and Douglas Adams' Arthur Dent. The conversations concern bad literature and Oxford dons, and usually take place in a comfortable Oxford pub. And the villains escape on bicycles.

The critic Anthony Boucher once described the British writer and composer, Edmund Crispin (pseudonym for Robert Bruce Montgomery) as a "master of fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek mystery novels, a blend of John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, M.R. James, and the Marx Brothers.""The Moving Toyshop," published in 1946, was Crispin's third Gervase Fen mystery. This particular whodunit involves an unusual will, a hunt for five eccentric characters named after the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, and of course, a moving toy shop with a corpse in its upper story. The action begins in the Autumn of 1938, when the poet, Richard Cadogan wangles an advance from his London publisher and sets out for a vacation in Oxford.The reader begins to realize the oddity of the journey he has embarked upon with the poet, when Cadogan hitches a ride with truck driver who quotes Coleridge ("a thahsand, thahsand slimy things lived on and so did I.") but prefers D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Somebody's Lover."We're entering Fen Country now, where even the truck drivers and police detectives are amateur literary critics, and our detective, Gervase Fen is the Oxford don of English Language and Literature. Dialogue fizzes with cynical witticisms and literary allusions when Fen and the poet, Cadogan go at it, or when Fen takes on any of a number of amateur classicists who populate "The Moving Toyshop."All of Crispin's Fen mysteries can be read with pleasure for the dialogue alone. This particular book also has a full cast of British eccentrics, including the five Edward Lear characters (one of whom is a murderer).Here is your first limerick-clue:"There was an Old Person of Mold who shrank from sensations of Cold; so he purchased some muffs, some furs, and some fluffs, and wrapped himself up from the cold."Racket through the streets (and sometimes the lawns) of Oxford in Fen's battered, red roadster, Lily Christine III! Make up limericks and shout them out to passing scholars! Join the hunt for the missing toyshop, the corpse, and the murderer! You will enjoy a sometimes farcical, always exhilarating ride."The Moving Toyshop" is Crispin on his own home turf (he was educated at St. John's College, Oxford), and at the top of his classical form.

I found nine Edumund Crispin novels bundled three to a book and bought all three (nine mysteries). To say "well-written" is an understatement. They are witty, clever, surprising and best of all, entertaining. These thick tales hail from a time when ideas propelled a story - no bad language, vivid sex scenes, inordiante violence. They are works of beautiful, well-written prose [by a church organist yet!] If you like academic settings (think of Dorothy Sayers) you will love Crispin's stores

This is a fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek, atmospheric murder mystery, with bright, entertaining, extremely literate dialogue, appealingly rumpled characters, and a pervasive sense of humor. The action takes place in 1930s Oxford. From the don, Gervase Fen, to the sallow woman with the beaded hat, the characters and the setting are drawn vividly. The mystery itself is implausible, but that hardly matters...like the old Thin Man movies of the same period, the story itself is little more than an excuse for the entertainingly arch, high-brow romp.

This book is very funny and exciting! Read it!