The Moving Toyshop

⚖The case for it

A poet finds a body in an Oxford toyshop at night and comes back with the police to find a grocer’s. What follows is less detection than a comic machine: Gervase Fen and Cadogan bickering across the city, a chase involving a stolen car and a fairground carousel that reviewers compare to Mack Sennett, and a church service interrupted. Fen breaks the fourth wall to work out what would happen in a detective novel. One clue sits inside an Edward Lear limerick. Readers call the “brilliant double-act that are Fen and Cadogan” reason enough.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The plot runs on stacked coincidence, convenient pub encounters and doors that happen to be unlocked, which readers call “too preposterous to be interesting” even by farce standards. Fen barely detects. The women are introduced by appearance and a swipe at Jane Austen lands as “casual misogyny” rather than wit. The tone strikes a cluster of readers as “intolerably smug and self-satisfied,” with one concluding that “Crispin is nowhere near as funny as he thinks he is.” And after all that setup, “the explanation of how the toyshop vanished is disappointing.”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings