#10 Favourite Read of 2012

By my paws and whiskers this was quite simply brilliant.

Listed in Keating's 100 Best Crime and Mystery Books, Moving Toyshop is "a froth of bubbling spirits, a sparkling example of the donnish detective story", at its heart is the absurd disappearance of a toyshop visited in midnight Oxford, which is explained with perfect plausibility by the time of the denouement. One night, Richard Cadogan, poet and would-be bon-vivant, finds the body of an elderly woman in an Oxford More...

The Moving Toyshop is one of my all time favourites. I remember making a presentation on it at school, when I was about 12 years old. And having re-read it now, I see it has lost none of its unique charm. Edmund Crispin is the most adorable of the mystery authors of the golden age. He (or, rather, the narrator) often speaks to the readers directly, as when the attractive sleuth, an Oxford lit prof, Gervase Fen mentions he's inventing book titles for Crispin. The book is farcical, delightful, a t More...

Tras la desilusión de saber que comenzaba una serie por el tercer libro (los primeros fueron obviados por impedimenta, aunque el primero se publicó en español por Alianza: El caso de la mosca dorada #1; Holy disorders #2 no lo he encontrado en español) de una serie de 11 (el canto del cisne #4 también publicado por impedimenta, love lies bleeding #5, buried for pleasure#6, frequent hearses#7, the long divorce#8, beware of the trains#9, the glimpses of the moon#10, Fen country twenty-six stories More...

When it comes to mysteries, I think I began with the creme de la creme -- a friend introduced me to Dorothy Sayers, Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh, and a few other select authors in my mid-twenties -- I'd never read any mysteries until that time.

The Moving Toyshop is a favorite mystery, and one I've read several time. It's fast-paced, witty, and chock full of the eccentric English characters that have become stock-in-trade for such writers a Martha Grimes and other "cozy" mystery writers -- but th More...

This little honey is a perfect gem, not so much for the classic "locked room" mystery set-up, but for the delightfully wacky sleuth, Professor Gervase Fen. Teaching classics at Oxford, Fen is an absolute riot, recruiting bands of rowdy students to help round up the criminals at the novel's end, and frequently speaking about himself in the third person as... the hero of a mystery novel.

Simply beautiful, original, and fun. For a while, this was the only Crispin I could fin din print, but they hav More...

Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978) wrote comic mystery novels under the pen name of Edmund Crispin, the first of which, "The Case of the Gilded Fly," was published in 1944. Crispin didn't write many novels, but those he did featured the eccentric, absent-minded Oxford don and professor of English and Literature, Gervase Fen.

The third of these books is perhaps his best. Titled "The Moving Toyshop," PD James named it as one of the best five mysteries of all time and critic and mystery writer H.R. More...

I knew this book was a dark horse before I started reading it. I think this may have detracted slightly from my enjoyment of it - when Toby was reading it and laughing out loud, reading out funny parts and noting the self-referentiality of it all, I was surprised. But when it came to reading it for myself, I knew all this already, and so my bar for pleasant surprise was higher. I expected Fen to be making up titles for the author during the story, otherwise that escapade might have reduced me to More...

Action packed and great fun. Crispin’s tongue-in-cheek descriptive humour sparkles engagingly; for example, (pg 57) “Among the altos, hooting morosely like ships in a Channel fog – which is the way of altos the world over …” Utterly improbable yet brilliantly believable. Fen, as the White Rabbit (“Oh my fur and whiskers!”) holds it all together.

In the Wall Street Journal of 22 October 2006, PD James placed "The Moving Toyshop" amongst her top five most riveting detective novels, describing it t More...

A word to the modern American reader: Eschew your impatience, simply enjoy the book!

In our make-work, haste-driven world, a book such as this is often cast aside as "slow-moving" or "full of irrelevancies." It is, in fact, a beautiful representative of what is knows as a Golden Age mystery. The mildly-to-wildly exaggerated characters, the fourth-wall breaking, the tangential commentary, all of these things are part of developing a wonderful and sweeping narrative that is designed to put the read More...

I knew I was going to like this book when I opened it to the section where the two sleuths, Cadogan and Gervase Fen, find themselves bound and locked in a closet. The rest of the college is away at lunch, and with no one to rescue them, they must amuse themselves with a game called "Unreadable Books."

'All right. Ulysses.'
'Yes. Rabelais.'
'Yes. Tristram Shandy.'
'Yes. The Golden Bowl.'
'Yes. Rasselas.'
'No. I like that.'
'Clarissa, then.'
'Yes. Titus ....'

Ugh ... how spot on! Within the last year, I've More...

Begins with the middle aged poet Richard Cadogan playing around with a pistol while attempting to get his publisher to give him an advance so that he can go on holiday to Oxford and attempt get his creative juices flowing. Cadogan tells his publisher, "This isn't a Chekhov play," but of course it is a murder mystery and the gun will--as in a Chekhov play--inevitably go off before the book ends. The novel is littered with literary fun and games. When Cadogan is stranded at a train station on the More...

The writing is so delightful and witty, the characters so charming, the setting so droll, the set-up so interesting, that one forgives The Moving Toyshop for ultimately being a thoroughly implausible, thoroughly artificial "puzzle" mystery whose solution is considerably less interesting than everything along the way.

Set in the 1940s (give or take), The Moving Toyshop follows a poet from London to Oxford where he finds a dead body above a toyshop, gets knocked over the head, and when he finally r More...

I don't know how I managed to NOT know about Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen mysteries when I became an avid reader of Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh many years ago, but now I have discovered him thanks to a sale at Audible. I got this audiobook at a price of $4.95, which is pretty close to what one may pay for a used paperback. What a deal! I loved this story, and I may have to listen to it again to see if I can catch more of the literary references.

Although the Oxford setting and the literary quo More...

This is considered one of the gems of the Golden Age of Mysteries, though I was a little underwhelmed. Poet Richard Cadogan, in search of adventure to perk up his weary muse, sets out to Oxford, where he went to college. Walking through the town at midnight, he stumbles into a toyshop and discovers a dead body. Then he's struck on the head and dumped into an empty closet. Upon awakening the next morning he escapes and fetches the police, but on returning discovers that the toyshop has turned int More...

The Moving Toyshop is a locked room, crime farce. Crispin writes in taut, tight prose, that is all show and no tell so that the plot moves along a jaunty pace. The characterisation is nicely observed, especially the double act of Cadogan, the poet out of his depth, and Fen, the bright detective who ignores the law. The other principles are also well penned. The plot is quite intricate, and the puzzle is agreeably knotted. A streak of dark humour runs throughout and as the story unfolds the farce More...

Poet Richard Cadogan gets away from London for a sojourn at Oxford, hoping for adventure. He finds it when he stumbles across a toyshop with an unlocked door late at night. Exploring the rooms above the toyshop, he discovers a corpse. Before he can tell anyone, someone conks him on the head. Four hours later, he recovers consciousness, notifies the police and returns with them to the scene of the crime. Only there's a grocery store where the toyshop was, and no sign of a corpse. The police assum More...

An exuberant, alcohol-fuelled romp around late 1930s Oxford with eccentric dons and unruly students charging about and the dim plods lumbering along behind. This aspect of the book is humorous and graphic and the only aspect the author really takes seriously. The murder mystery is imaginatively posed, but clearly without forethought by the author as to its eventual resolution. The story behind how the toyshop moved and how and why a body came to be in it, to be found around midnight by a poet pa More...

La juguetería errante (1946) es una comedia policiaca al estilo británico que sigue la tradición de Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Agatha Christie o Wodehouse. Es esta una novela de detectives bien cargada de humor que protagonizan Richard Cadogan, un poeta que se marcha unos días a Oxford después de discutir con su editor, y Gervase Fen, un excéntrico profesor de literatura inglesa y detective aficionado.

Todo comienza cuando Cadogan se encuentra sorprendentemente con el cadáver de una mujer en una ju More...

3.5 stars. Whether you will enjoy this book or not probably depends on what style of mystery you like. I'd classify The Moving Toyshop primarily as a romp—though our detectives do spend some time detecting and reasoning things out, they spend a lot more time chasing suspects through the streets of Oxford. The central principle is clever, and the question of motive in particular has some interesting quirks to it. The abundant humor is zany and offbeat and the pages liberally sprinkled with quotat More...

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin is utterly fabulous. It cropped up on some list of great sleuthing books a while ago and recently, I decided I needed a random treat. Having forgotten all the details that merited its placement on my Amazon wishlist, I was plunged into a wickedly funny and delicious murder mystery romp that takes place over twenty four hours in Oxford.

The Moving Toyshop is the third in a series of novels featuring Gervase Fen, an Oxford don who evidently solves crimes more of More...

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language & Literature at Oxford University, becomes involved in one of his strangest cases: a murdered old woman in a toyshop. Murder is one thing, but when the toyshop itself vanishes entirely, Fen must bring all of his intellect to bear to solve the crime.

The book is quite funny at times, with lots of great dialogue. There are tons of literary references and allusions, making the book a veritable treasure hunt for Anglophiles and literature lovers. Fen is More...

Confession: I love watching crime procedurals.

There's something so fascinating to me about the mystery behind a crime: Whodunnit? Howdeydunnit? Whydeydunnit? Whodatdere?

Most of all, I like that they require little to no commitment to the show to watch -- you don't really need to know much about the detectives to understand the gathering of clues and the eventually nabbing of the perpetrator.

But, as a result, crime procedurals usually feel pretty one-dimensional -- bad guy commits crime, good gu More...

It's hard for me to give this book an adequate review. For some reason I could only find brief moments of time to read a few pages at a time so this short book too a strangely long time to get through. And by the time I was near the end I was somewhat tired of it and very ready to move on. This is a shame because I actually did enjoy the quirky characters and the somewhat silly plot. When a man stumbles into a toy shop in the night to find a dead woman, he turns to his friend, Oxford don/amateur More...

Not so much a locked room mystery more a charming and clever caper. A cracking little instalment in the Gervase Fen mystery series.

As ever a cast of eccentric characters take you on a rampaging and mischievous journey, this time involving the discovery of a body above a toyshop that miraculously disappears. The characters trade brilliant one liners and despite the fact this was written in the mid 40s (but set in '38) there are some wonderfully spot on observations of people and the world.

To al More...

Very clever and very funny, especially the literary allusions. A famous poet, Richard Cadogan, seeks adventure and a change of scene in Oxford, UK where he went to school. He stumbles on a murder in a toy shop at midnight, is conked on the head and stuffed in a closet and escapes out a window once he comes to. Dutifully, he reports this to the police who return to scene of the crime only to find it's a grocers and there's no corpus delicti. So Richard scares up his old friend and Oxford don, Ger More...

Crispin makes it possible to solve a mystery and have a lot of fun while doing it.I loved the mad caper that our detective Gervase Fen led us on in the university city of Oxford. The premise of the story is that a body is found by the protagonist- Richard Cadogan, in a toyshop. He is hit on the head and passes out. The next day when he returns to the shop he finds the body missing and the shop converted to a grocery shop!

I enjoyed the humor in this book. The irreverent references to Jane Auste More...

Amusing shaggy-dog mystery from Edmund Crispin. Full of literary references and arcane silliness, it is one of his 'Gervase Fen' books. Fen is an eccentric Oxford Don - frightfully clever, sarcastic and given to spouting literary references. The book is also noteworthy for 'breaking the fourth wall', as in lines such as 'let's turn left - after all this is being published by Gollancz' (paraphrase), and Fen's attempts at book titles titles for Crispin. It is dedicated to his friend Larkin, and in More...

The classic Crispin. Bonkers, facetious, frothy, and yet with an odd, bitter, cruel imagination lying within it that suggests that Crispin (or rather Bruce Montgomery, his real name) was in many ways a genuine deep-seated misanthrope. This came home to me re-reading Frequent Hearses recently, which I found almost unbearably hateful towards its cast of characters. Moving Toyshop manages the balance much better, with the result that it is the irresistible, very funny, humour that carries you throu More...

Fen seems to be a man of limitless energy and tireless enthusiasm, at least when challenged by an unsolved mystery: only twenty four hours elapse between Richard Cadogan's inadvertent discovery, around midnight, of the murdered Miss Tandy in a flat adjoining a toy shop somewhere along the Iffley Road, and Fen's dramatic capture of the gun-toting murderer on an out-of-control carousel in the nearby Botley fairground. Continued More...

Originally published on my blog here in January 2001.

Set almost entirely in the city of Oxford, The Moving Toyshop begins with the accidental discovery of a body in a toyshop by a distinguished poet. When he returns with the police (some time later, as he was attacked and knocked unconscious), the toyshop is not there at all, and the police are inclined to believe he imagined the whole thing because of the blow to the head. However, his friend Gervase Fen, professor of English and amateur sleuth More...