Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN num: 9780140088175
ISBN number: 0140088172
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 208
Printing Date: July 05, 1989
Publishing house: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Sale Popularity Level: 409535
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
It is late at night when poet Cadogan stumbles on the dead body of an old lady in an Oxford toyshop. The following morning, the toyshop has vanished and in its place is a grocery store. Nobody, not even the police, seem surprised.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
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 subsequent 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.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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 subsequent 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.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers -
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.
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