LU091 Classic Mysteries: "The Moving Toy Shop," by Edmund Crispin

The Moving Toyshop is a quintessential "Golden Age" mystery that prioritizes intellectual high spirits and surreal wit over gritty realism. The story follows Richard Cadogan, a frustrated poet who travels to Oxford in search of inspiration, only to stumble into a locked toyshop in the middle of the night where he discovers the body of a strangled woman. After being knocked unconscious, Cadogan wakes up to a baffling reality: the toyshop has completely vanished, replaced by a mundane grocery store that appears to have been there for years.

To solve the impossible disappearance, Cadogan enlists his old friend Gervase Fen, an eccentric Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature who moonlights as a reckless amateur detective. What follows is a "breezy, Hollywood-style romp" through the streets of Oxford as the duo careens about in a beat-up sports car, deciphering clues hidden in Edward Lear’s limericks and uncovering a complex web involving an insane will and a cast of colorful suspects. Crispin’s writing is famously "donnish," peppered with literary allusions, wordplay, and meta-fictional nods—including Fen’s habit of breaking the fourth wall to complain about the plot.

Described by P.D. James as one of the most riveting crime novels ever written, The Moving Toyshop is a "darkly comic requiem" to the traditional detective story, blending situation comedy with genuine suspense. A strong discussion angle for the group is Crispin’s use of Oxford as a "progenitor of unlikely events"—a setting where the line between academic eccentricity and criminal absurdity becomes delightfully blurred.

The novel’s climactic merry-go-round sequence famously served as the uncredited inspiration for the finale of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered by five days before the group meets, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

Registration opens on Wednesday, 13 May.