The Moving Toyshop (Penguin Classic Crime)

Rating:
Summary: A great central conceit and a lively cast
Review: This is the most famous of the Gervase Fen mysteries Edmund Crispin wrote in the early half of the century, and its exceptionally fastmoving 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 toystore and discovers a dead body, and then the next 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 carrousel 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.