Customer Reviews

The Moving Toyshop

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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

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.

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.

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 is probably the best of the Gervase Fen mysteries. All of the Fen mysteries are entertaining. The principal character, Gervase Fen, is an eccentric Oxford professor and successful amateur detective. All of them are marked by clever plotting, often with a literary element, and fine comic writing. This novel features a particularly clever plot, probably the best character development of all the Fen novels, and above all, great wit. It contains the comic chase scene to end all comic chase scenes.
This book, in an odd way, is also prescient. One of the characters is a middle-aged, somewhat dissatisfied, and prominent English poet. The book is dedicated to the author's good friend, Philip Larkin, and at the time of publication, both Larkin and the author must have been young men. Larkin went on to become the best known English poet of his generation and several of his best poems are about the dissatisfactions of middle age.

This is the most famous of the Gervase Fen mysteries Edmund Crispin wrote in the early half of the century, and its exceptionally fast-moving and funny. Fen is an Oxford don, so much of the fun of the work depends upon the characters constantly debating the literary merits of different authors (a Janeite and a Lawrence fan feature into the plot, Fen is paged once as "Mr. T. S. Eliot," and Joyce and Rabelais are dissed as unreadable). The novel begins with a doozy of a puzzle (a poet-friend of Fen's stumbles late at night into a toy store and discovers a dead body, and then the next day the body is gone and the toyshop has vanished--and no one can remember anything other than a grocer's on the site), but it unfortunately the plot becomes a bit cheesy as it wears on (too much attention is given to the "locked room" aspect of the mystery, and some of the stuff with Edmund Lear seems unnecessarily complicated). Still, the characters are superb and very much in the Dorothy Sayers mode, and the climax on a runaway carousel is not only exciting but indisputibly the inspiration for STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. This does date as mysteries go, but the pleausre is in discovering what used to be exciting reading sixty years ago.

This is a fun read; definitely a Whodunnit, but Crispin's work is a lot more thoughtful than others of this genre. Lots of running around with an odd sort of eccentrics and very much in the British cozy style set in pre-WWII 20th century.

If you enjoy dry humor, literature and puzzles -- along with old movies and nostalgia, you will enjoy this book.

The Moving Toyshop has been enshrined as Crispin's best detective novel, but it is not, in my opinion. The people who admire this book talk about the humor, but rarely about the plot. Yet Crispin, when he disciplined himself, had a first-class mind for puzzles. Unless you really enjoy English donnish humor, with lots of literary quotations, of course, I would advise you to avoid this one and seek out The Long Divorce or Love Lies Bleeding.

This book would have eluded me altogether, but I happened to pick up a book entitled "501 Must-Read Books". The Moving Toyshop was listed and the synopsis was so intriguing I looked high and low to find this book. I ended up having to resort to eBay. It was a worthwhile purchase and, more importantly, The story lived up to its promise!

The synopsis is quite a simple one. A man stumbles into a toyshop in the dead of night. Inside he discovers a dead body, he is then knocked unconscious. When he awakens the next morning both the body AND toyshop are gone. He enlists the help of his friend, a professor of literature at Oxford, to help him find the body and prove he is not going crazy. Not only is this book enjoyable to read, it is funny. The professor is an enjoyable lead character, from his bad driving, to his famous quotations, to his overall sense of humor.

This book is well worth finding and I am looking forward to reading Crispin's other works as well.

The plot is secondary to Crispin's beautiful use of the written word. This book is a fun book to read and invites expanding one's mind a bit.