posted on 30 Jun 2019

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Edmund Crispin is the pen name of Bruce Montgomery (1921 - 1978), an Oxford graduate who made his reputation as a composer in the 1950s – he was responsible for the scores of several Carry On movies as well as more serious material. His detective stories - clever, literary and firmly tongue-in-cheek - are very much a product of a specific time and a specific social class. But most of all they are a sort of love letter to Oxford and to a halcyon notion of the values of university life and all those fortunate enough to participate in that elite world - students and dons alike. Whether the world Crispin creates was ever a reality seems to me to be highly doubtful - I suspect it’s a fond creation very much in the way Wodehouse created the worlds of Wooster, Jeeves and Lord Emsworth.

Plenty of commentators, detective novel habitués and fellow authors cite The Moving Toyshop as Crispin's best and the book that provides readers with peak Gervese Fen. Fen is Crispin's engagingly eccentric amateur sleuth and erstwhile English Literature professor and in this book he is joined by his friend and poet Richard Cadogan, whose decision to take a late night walk into Oxford to renew old acquaintances triggers the uncovering of the sinister murder of an old lady in a toyshop. The title of the novel might give you a clue to what happens next - after reporting the finding of the body to the police, Cadogan discovers the toyshop, along with said body, has disappeared. At this point it's enter Fen in his ostentatious red sports car and the chase to solve the murder mystery is well and truly joined.

This is most certainly in the great tradition of the British 'cosy crime' genre and Crispin's almost surreal plotting, a number of hare-brained chases and some especially inept villains all add to a story that's less detective grit and more Aldwych farce. But for all that, the general good humour and silly charm of the story will probably keep you going unless you’re an intractable detective thriller hardliner.

The plot - which I don't intend to expose in this review - is both simple and, at the same time, full of twists and convolutions. But, in the appropriate way for stories of this kind, involves a contested inheritance, an eccentric spinster and a sinister solicitor. There's the obligatory pretty young girl thrown in to suggest a romantic interest for Cadogan and an array of more or less eccentric university teaching staff and students, all of who have their role to play at different times as the plot unfolds.

The author also delights in playing what we'd now think of as meta-fictional games with the reader in which characters casually refer to themselves as Crispin creations or reveal they know they are part of a fictional thriller plot. He also likes to throw in literary games for the reader to play along with - Fen and Cadogan, for example, play 'list the unreadable book' to pass time when they are tied-up in a cupboard.

There is no doubt that a modern reader would find Crispin's world dated and some of the attitudes towards women and social class a bit hard to take - but no more so than Wodehouse, Saki or Leacock. Accept it for what it is - roistering good fun - and you'll find it a congenial afternoon's reading.

 

Terry Potter

June 2019