As I'm a sucker for classic crime and can't resist any novel set in Oxford, I simply had to buy this when I spotted it in Blackwell's secondhand department a while back. Published in 1946 and dedicated to the author's great friend Philip Larkin, it's one of a series of nine novels and two short story collections featuring the fictional Oxford don Gervase Fen, a Professor of English at the fictional St Christopher's College in Oxford. But although Fen and his college may be fictional, they inhabit an Oxford which is very real, so reading the novel is a bit like a retro Morse/Lewis experience. And when you learn that Bruce Montgomery adopted the pseudonym Edmund Crispin from a novel the great Oxford crime writer Michael Innes (who was actually an Oxford don called J.I.M. Stewart), the whole thing becomes entirely irrestisible, to me at least. Montgomery was a celebrated musician and composer as well as a crime writer -- they don't make them like that these days, I'm afraid.
The plot of the novel is somewhat fantastic but just about falls within the realm of credibility. A poet, Richard Cadogan, sets off for Oxford in the middle of the night but gets stranded in Didcot when his train breaks down. He gets a lift in a lorry which drops him off at Headington roundabout, and sets off to walk into town. But he gets lost and ends up in Iffley Road (not, in fact, a very likely thing to happen but I suppose a bit of dramatic license is allowable), where he stumbles into a toyshop and discovers a dead body. However when he tells the police next morning, the toyshop has vanished, together with the body, and a grocery shop has appeared in its place. Cadogan seeks out his friend Fen, and the two of them set out to solve this apparently non-existent crime. This involves a great deal of dashing around the countryside in Fen's sports car, sitting in seedy pubs, gathering a set of eccentric side-kicks, and uncovering a series of complex but just about plausible happenings, including the reappearance of the toyshop in the Woodstock Road.
This is a novel of great charm and tremendous high spirits. It's also very literary -- everybody in the novel is constantly quoting poetry and Jacobean drama, even the pretty shopgirl Sally who is surprisingly keen on Marvell. Larkin gets his own private joke, when Fen picks up a student essay called "The Influence of Sir Gawain on Arnold's Empedocles on Etna", and comments: "Good heavens, that must be Larkin: the most indefatigable searcher out of pointless correspondences the world has ever known." And it's also rather ahead of its time in that the characters seem aware on occasion that they are taking part in a novel -- as for example when Cadogan alludes to the politics of the publisher:
"Let's go left", Cadogan suggested. "After all, Gollanz is publishing this book."
Everything speeds up and gets increasingly intense towards the conclusion, and the investigators end up in Botley, near Oxford Station. Here they first of all visit a flea-pit cinema (now alas long gone) where the film's dialogue is hilariously juxtaposed with the search for the murderer:
"Pa was a nice guy", said the film. "Who'd want to kill him?"
Fen got up and meandered down the gangway. An usherette, anxious to be helpful, approached and indicated to him the whereabouts of the gentleman's lavatory. He ignored her and continued peering about him.
"OK boys", said the film. "Take him to the morgue".
Finally everyone ends up in the Botley Fair (does this still take place? I never heard of it), the tawdriness of which reminds Cadogan of a scene from a Graham Greene novel: "somewhere there must be somebody saying a 'Hail Mary'...". In a terrific final tour de force, Fen and the murderer get trapped on the roundabout, which can't be stopped because the operator has been shot....
Altogether enormous fun. And the title? It's taken from the final lines of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, in which he says of women:
With varying vanities, from every part,
They shift the moving toyshop of their heart.
