The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
The Moving Toyshop is a locked room mystery starring the series-hero, English Language and Literature don Gervase Fen. Reminding us of Nero Wolf, he’s less a character than a collection of mannerisms and stock pfui-like ejaculations such as “Oh, my paws!” Fen does show a dark side like the early James Bond, when he waterboards a close-mouthed witness — actually, holds the guy’s head six times under water till he gets talkative — so same same.
This one is considered a classic, but for me, well, it takes a long time for things to happen in this mystery. Mainly due to Dickensian descriptions like this:
Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.
Edmund Crispin (Robert Bruce Montgomery) did not write many mysteries but he is still in print and remembered for his locked room mysteries a la John Dickson Carr, elaborate set-ups a la Dorothy Sayers, and a quirky detective hero a la Dame Agatha and Rex Stout. Like Michael Innes, the mystery writer for intellectuals who sheepishly admit to reading mysteries, he naturally uses ink-horn terms such as myrmidons, cachinnation, and saturnine. As Julian Symons says in Bloody Murder (1985), “Crispin’s work is marked by a highly individual sense of light comedy, and by a great flair for verbal deception rather in the Christie manner… At his weakest he is flippant, at his best he is witty, but all his work shows a high-spiritedness rare and welcome in the crime story.”
