I have always considered Edmund Crispin to have been one of the best and brightest writers of the years just past the Golden Age of Detection. Crispin, the pen name of Robert Bruce Montgomery, wrote only a handful of mysteries, most of them between 1944 and 1952. But his books, especially from that brief period, are marvelous, written with wit and style, full of literary allusions, jokes, impossible crimes, and ingenious solutions. Perhaps his best-known work is The Moving Toyshop (1946). When I wrote a review of this book for the Classic Mysteries podcast nearly a decade ago, I complained loudly (and, of course, to no avail) about the fact that the book was out of print. Since then, it had a brief return to being in print, but it's out again now. However, there is - at least - an e-book version now, which I'd recommend to you. So please forgive the rants which form a part of the following review:
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It is always wise to be careful what you wish for. Richard Cadogan, a successful poet, wishes for a little adventure in his humdrum life. He gets it all right when he discovers a murder…then finds that both the body and the place where the murder happened have disappeared. It happens in The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin.
The Moving Toyshop was Crispin’s third novel featuring the amateur detective work of Gervase Fen, a Professor of English at Oxford. The book combines wild humor with fairly gruesome and tense crime scenes – and does so both daringly and successfully, in my opinion.
The book begins with the adventures of poet Richard Cadogan. I should note here that Crispin dedicated the book to his friend, the English poet Philip Larkin, so using a poet as a central character is certainly appropriate here. At any rate, Cadogan, who begins the book by complaining to his publisher about the dullness of his life, sets off for Oxford on vacation. Through a series of misadventures, he misses a train connection and hitchhikes to the outskirts of Oxford, then sets out to walk into town in the middle of the night.
Along the way, he passes a small toyshop. On impulse, he tries the door handle. It is unlocked. He wanders inside the apparently deserted shop. Eventually, he goes upstairs – and discovers the body of a woman who appears to have been strangled. He is then hit over the head. When he recovers, a few hours later, he is locked in a small room downstairs – but the window is open. He makes his escape, walks the rest of the way into Oxford, and goes to the police. But when he and the police return to the scene of the crime, they find that the body has disappeared – and, more to the point, so has the toyshop. Instead, there is a small grocer’s store on the premises.
Fortunately, Cadogan has a good friend at Oxford in the person of English professor Gervase Fen, and the two men set out to investigate…well, to investigate what? Was there a murder? Was there a toyshop? While there are many good reasons why a murderer might want to remove a body from the scene, why would anyone move a toyshop? For that matter, why would the toyshop have been set up there in the first place?
The investigation will prove difficult and dangerous. It will involve a series of very peculiar clues – some of them based on the famous nonsense limericks of Edward Lear. And it will also turn out that the murder – yes, there was one – was an apparently impossible crime.
Through all of this, Crispin – and Fen – play with the reader. Clues are provided, often disguised by the dry humor and occasional slapstick of the surrounding novel. And – as in other Crispin novels – Fen occasionally breaks down the conventional walls of the novel, offering comments to his author. For instance, at one point, after Cadogan and Fen have both been knocked unconscious and tied up, Fen lies in the darkness and thinks up some phrases:
The Return of Fen. A Don Dares Death. The Blood on the Mortarboard.
“What’s that you’re saying?” Cadogan asked in a faint, rather gurgling voice.
“My dear fellow, are you all right? I was making up titles for Crispin.”
I enjoy that kind of joke, to be sure – the author poking fun at himself. And there is much more – for example, there is another Oxford professor, occasionally deaf when it is convenient for him to be so, accused by Fen of being on the verge of senility, yet of critical assistance to the forces of good in this story. Another memorable character is a student who is apparently irresistible to young women when he feeds them chocolates. And the humor is balanced by some truly unpleasant violence – for there is a second murder, not to mention some additional attempted killings. And the concluding scene takes place in a struggle on an out-of-control carousel at a fairground – a scene which was later used by film director Alfred Hitchcock for his version of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Trainl
I think The Moving Toyshop has just about anything a classic mystery lover could want – humor, fairness, a convoluted plot, a seemingly inexplicable situation (including an impossible murder), and a very skillful manipulation of the reader’s sympathies. Happily, the book is available and in print in the United Kingdom, and there are a great many used copies available from second-hand mystery bookdealers in the United States. You’ll find some links through Amazon and its network of dealers on our www.classicmysteries.net website. Crispin – the pen name of Bruce Montgomery, a prolific composer of British movie music – deserves a much wider audience, and The Moving Toyshop is certainly one of his best efforts.
One more thing about this book. Almost every work of fiction contains, in its preliminary pages, a legal warning, stating that any resemblance between the characters and events in the book and reality must be purely coincidental. Here is Crispin’s version of that warning, as expressed in The Moving Toyshop:
None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.
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You can listen to the original audio review from the podcast by clicking here.
Next week: Case for Three Detectives, by Leo Bruce.
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