Note: This continues my occasional series on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list (those mysteries deemed essential by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen).
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In The Moving Toyshop (1946), Oxford professor Fen (who sounds remarkably like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland) seeks to resolve the mystery of a murder victim found in a toyshop, which is replaced by a grocery store the next day, with no sign that a corpse ever existed. A notable and hilarious sequence is when a cohort of Fen's enlists a group of inebriated Oxford undergraduates as muscle merely on the promise of a drink.
Crispin is the pseudonym of composer Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-78), who worked on scores for six "Carry On" films and some of the "Doctor in the House" series; he also edited some science fiction collections. There's a new biography, Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books by David Whittle, out from Ashgate.
Maggie Topkis's Felony & Mayhem Press has reprinted several titles in the Fen series: The Case of the Gilded Fly, Swan Song, and Holy Disorders, and will be reprinting Love Lies Bleeding (also an entry on the Haycraft-Queen list) later this fall.
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