Edmund Crispin's Classic

I first came across the work of Edmund Crispin as a teenager, and I vividly remember reading The Moving Toyshop at school when I was about fourteen. I'd borrowed it from the town library, and took it in with me to while away dull moments in between lessons. The book had a map of Oxford, a city which I'd never visited, and never dreamed that I would get to know well. I really enjoyed the story, and acquired my own copy of the book many years later. But for some reason I've not got round to re-reading it until now.

There are a couple of reasons why I returned to The Moving Toyshop. First, I've been asked to talk to visiting crime writers from overseas about Oxford detectives at a conference in a couple of months' time and I felt I'd better do some homework. Second, I attended a talk given by Susan Moody at Crimefest on the subject of Oxford detective stories. Susan's enthusiasm made me think it was time to go back to Crispin.

I'm glad I did. The Moving Toyshop is tremendous fun, light-hearted and with an unusual, if occasionally eccentric plot that makes use of a very interesting legal device, the secret trust. The early chapters are quite dazzling and there are some memorable characters, including a very dodgy solicitor, and lots of witty lines. Gervase Fen, the amiable English don, leads the chase for the person who killed Miss Tardy in the toyshop..

Of course, in a high-spirited book like this, it is not easy to maintain tension throughout, and there are moments when farce predominates. The mystery is nicely constructed, but not as striking as the wonderful premise of the toyshop that appears to be in two different parts of Oxford. Crispin is very good at capturing the city's essential atmosphere, and it is a genuine tragedy that his great talent burned out so soon. After a flurry of novels, he was in effect burned out at the age of thirty and he spent the rest of his life drinking himself slowly to death. We had a long wait for his last book,The Glimpses of the Moon, but it proved to be a disappointment. Far better to remember this witty entertainer by books like The Moving Toyshop.

(Incidentally, are other Blogger users finding, as I have done lately, that the previous torrent of spam comments has reduced to a trickle at most? Long may this continue...)

Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin

Bruce Montgomery was the real name of the detective novelist Edmund Crispin, who wrote his first novel while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. I read his most famous book, The Moving Toyshop, when I was about 14, some time before I thought about going to university. It's a book full of high spirits, which makes good use of the Oxford setting. It appealed to me more than Gaudy Night, that's for sure.

Crispin was influenced by John Dickson Carr, rather more than by Michael Innes, who wrote even more stories with an Oxford background, and I must say Carr is more to my taste than Innes, because the mystery plots are more compelling. But Crispin produced nothing for many years, and when his amateur sleuth Gervase Fen finally reappeared, I found The Glimpses of the Moon a sad disappointment.

David Whittle's sympathetic biography, Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: a life in music and books, explains the downward trajectory of his subject's life. He was an alcoholic, who suffered a good deal of ill health in his later years. It's a sad story, and his rather inept love life sounds rather depressing.

And yet he achieved a good deal. Not only those excellent early mysteries (though as a crime novelist he was burned out at 30) but also light music - he wrote often for films, including Carry On and Doctor movies. He was friendly with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and in some ways as talented. Whittle gives a good deal of insight into a life that began brilliantly, but all too soon entered a decline. A pricey but worthwhile biography.