The Moving Toyshop
Philadelphia - New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1946. First American Edition, 1st Printing. 8vo, 7 3/8 x 5 in. (187 x 127 mm); pp. 250; includes a Sketch Plan of Oxford locating the main locations in the plot; teal blue cloth binding with black lettering; original pictorial dust-jacket with a photo of the author at the piano. Dust jacket with some chips and tears; pages clean with slight toning on the edges. A Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone of Detective Fiction Selection (1946).
One of the outstanding classics of crime mystery in its FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, published the same year as the London edition by Gollancz. Detective novelist P. D. James picked The Moving Toyshop as one of her five "most riveting crime novels" . Edmund Crispin is one of the few mystery writers able to combine situation comedy and high spirits with detection. "The Moving Toyshop" is set in Oxford—a popular city for mystery writers—and has as its detective an eccentric amateur, Gervase Fen, a professor of English at the university. A murder is discovered in a toyshop, but when the police arrive the shop itself has disappeared. Suspension of disbelief is occasionally needed, but this spirited frolic of a detective story retains its place as one of the most engaging and ingenious mysteries of its age.» (The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, June 3, 2006)
Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of (Robert) Bruce Montgomery (1921 – 1978), the celebrated English crime writer best known for his series of nine novels which appeared between 1944 and 1953, starting with The Case of The Gilded Fly.
He created the famous character of the Oxford don Gervase Fen, a professor of English and a fellow of a fictional college,based on St. John's College, which Montgomery/Crispin attended. Fen is loosely based on his Oxford tutor, a sometimes absent-minded, eccentric character. The books are written in a humorous, literary and sometimes farcical style with frequent references to music, English literature and poetry.
Under his own name Bruce Montgomery was a prolific composer of vocal and choral music (including An Oxford Requiem,1951) and of music for the cinema, writing scores for over 40 films and many British comedies of the 1950s including the Carry On series.
Condition: Near fine / Very good.
Item number: 452
Price: $300.00
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