— fiction-mystery-crime —
The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin
— 1946 —
“
A body in a toyshop that disappears by morning; an Oxford don detective named Gervase Fen; infectious wit and ingenious plotting that has never gone out of print.
⚖The case for it
A body in a toyshop that disappears by morning; an Oxford don detective named Gervase Fen; infectious wit and ingenious plotting that has never gone out of print. Crispin represents the Golden Age at its most playful: self-aware, comic, brilliant. His academic Oxford rivals any of Sayers' ecclesiastical settings.
— the canon
✕The case against
Farce keeps lapping the detection. Fen breaks the fourth wall to joke about his publisher, the chases run on coincidence, and the whole mystery turns on an eccentric will clause that would survive about four minutes in an actual probate court. Delightful, yes; as a fair-play puzzle it barely pretends to try.
— the honest librarian
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