Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.
The Plot:
Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.
My Thoughts:
… And the plot just derails from here onwards. I really tried to like Fen and Cadogan, but I thought their characters were simply too harum-scarum and cardboard-ish. The motives and background stories were thin and poorly plotted. Even Edward Lear was just thrown in because Lit Professors must get puzzles of the literary sort. All of this is a farce, full of absurd clues and wishful coincidences and just running around. There’s very little actual “detection”.
It’s very convenient that Fen has several useful connections with the police and in the student and scholar communities (because he is an Oxford Professor, and everyone in Oxford loves debating over literature with him). This did lead to a few mildly humorous scenes, but nothing that will get you into peals of laughter. There’s this guy in the book who keeps offering chocolates to women, and he was the real star of this book. Otherwise, everything just dragged on, with very little emotional quotient.
Moving Toyshop would have worked better as a comedy film back in the 1930s, of Laurel & Hardy type perhaps. It seems that there actually is a 1964 show based on this book, though I couldn’t find it anywhere.
Rating: 6 of 10
A few reviews compared the book to Wodehouse and Christie – I think those reviews are misleading. I say, give me back the 8 hours I spent reading this cute but absolute bore.
14 replies on “The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin”
I’ll be giving this one a miss I think, thanks for sharing your thoughts
Cardboard characters are the actual worst. I’m going through that with one of my current reads.
That’s the worst! I wonder which one is giving you so much trouble though
I know he’s one of the classic authors so I have meant to read him but perhaps this is not the one to start with!
I don’t know if it was because this is Book 3 in the series? Maybe things are better if one reads the series in order…
This definitely has an intriguing premise! I’m sorry to hear it was disappointing though. I love Laurel & Hardy as an aside. But yeah- sounds like a definite let- down, which is unfortunate.
Yeah, I loved that whole “toyshop-turns-to-grocery shop overnight” idea. Well, you know what they say about high expectations. 🙁
Too bad, the description sounded good
I have read two books by this author … this one and the first book in the series, The Case of the Gilded Fly. I don’t remember details, but I did like this book when I read it (in 2003). I did not like the first book and I did not particularly like the Gervase Fen character. A lot of readers do love this series, and especially this book.
Hmm. I was wondering if reading the series out of order was the problem. I think the problem may have been Fen, he’s simply not believable as a detective. I just did a general search for all the reviews out there — and most seemed to love it, just like you said. I’d hate it if I wasn’t doing justice to the book!
This has been on my list for a while, but maybe I’ll continue to put it off.
That is disappointing! It sounds like it had a good premise, but didn’t quite get there. Thank-you for the honest review!
Yeah, it began so well. I was ready for a madcap adventure, and then it just fizzled away
Nope, not read this one and don’t intend to do so given your thoughts.
Lynn 😀