The Moving Toyshop

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The opening premise of this classic, little-known whodunnit is fascinating: a poet pining for adventure stumbles into the outskirts of what feels like 1930s Oxford in the very earliest hours of morning and, through sheer nosiness, discovers the body of a woman in a flat above a toyshop. He is subsequently knocked unconscious, and wakes up later that morning only to find that the toyshop is now (and always has been) a grocers’, and the body missing. Enter Crispin’s detective, Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at one of Oxford’s colleges.

This book, first published in 1946, is not the first in Crispin’s Gervase Fen series, but that didn’t prove to be a problem, for it works perfectly well as a stand-alone novel. The writing crisp, fast-paced, and extremely readable. It is also very comic, as are the characters themselves. Crispin imbues them with just enough depth to make them interesting.

However, I felt the author made things unnecessarily complicated with the indiscriminate use of both code names and real names for the suspects, a device that made working out what actually occurred so much harder. Neither did I enjoy the sprinkling of untranslated Latin phrases, the many classical references (which meant nothing to me), the use of the term “slut” for a cleaning lady (which I found truly shocking for some reason), and the misuse, twice, of the term “libel”, where the author clearly meant “slander”.

But these are tiny matters and, overall, I really enjoyed this book. I would happily recommend it to anyone with a taste for classic British whodunnits—not quite locked-room, but as close as dammit. By the way, I found the thing that Crispin later refers to as a “red herring”.

But that’s just my own humble opinion…what do you think? Do let me know! Read for the Crime & Thrillers reading group that I attend at Canada Water Library.


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