Book review
Jan. 3rd, 2003 01:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaThe Moving Toyshop - Edmund Crispin
I'm a sucker for old-fashioned, green-jacketed Penguin whodunnits.
The Moving Toyshop is a highly unbelievable account of a murder, and its subsequent investigation, set among the Oxfor university colleges. It's written in fantastic P G Wodehouse-style frivolity, contains cheerfully ludicrous, flamboyant characters, and bowls along with all the incongruity of a well-aimed cricket ball at an afternoon tea party.
The characters are perfectly well aware that they are in a book, in fact one of them spends some spare time trying to assist the author by thinking up suitably penny-dreadul titles for the current chapter. There's an English don who's trying to investigate a crime, and the Chief Inspector who doesn't want to inverstigate the crime, and would really rather discuss the symbolism behind Measure for Measure. And of course, there's a villain who explains large chunks of the Plot, as it seems 'only fair' before he shoots the central characters.
I loved it :)
And particularly the author's note at the beginning:
"None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns in England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits."
I'm a sucker for old-fashioned, green-jacketed Penguin whodunnits.
The Moving Toyshop is a highly unbelievable account of a murder, and its subsequent investigation, set among the Oxfor university colleges. It's written in fantastic P G Wodehouse-style frivolity, contains cheerfully ludicrous, flamboyant characters, and bowls along with all the incongruity of a well-aimed cricket ball at an afternoon tea party.
The characters are perfectly well aware that they are in a book, in fact one of them spends some spare time trying to assist the author by thinking up suitably penny-dreadul titles for the current chapter. There's an English don who's trying to investigate a crime, and the Chief Inspector who doesn't want to inverstigate the crime, and would really rather discuss the symbolism behind Measure for Measure. And of course, there's a villain who explains large chunks of the Plot, as it seems 'only fair' before he shoots the central characters.
I loved it :)
And particularly the author's note at the beginning:
"None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns in England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits."
