The Moving Toyshop

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First published in Great Britain by

Victor Gollancz 1946

Copyright © Rights Limited,

1946. All rights reserved

Edmund Crispin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

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A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008124120

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008124137

Version: 2017-10-27

For Philip Larkin in friendship and esteem

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note

Map

Chapter 1: The Episode of the Prowling Poet

Chapter 2: The Episode of the Dubious Don

Chapter 3: The Episode of the Candid Solicitor

Chapter 4: The Episode of the Indignant Janeite

Chapter 5: The Episode of the Immaterial Witness

Chapter 6: The Episode of the Worthy Carman

Chapter 7: The Episode of the Nice Young Lady

Chapter 8: The Episode of the Eccentric Millionairess

Chapter 9: The Episode of the Malevolent Medium

Chapter 10: The Episode of the Interrupted Seminar

Chapter 11: The Episode of the Neurotic Physician

Chapter 12: The Episode of the Missing Link

Chapter 13: The Episode of the Rotating Professor

Chapter 14: The Episode of the Prescient Satirist

About the Author

Also in This Series

About the Publisher

Footnotes

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 of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits

E.C.

Key

Richard Cadogan raised his revolver, took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The explosion rent the small garden and, like the widening circles which surrounded a pebble dropped into the water, created alarms and disturbances of diminishing intensity throughout the suburb of St John’s Wood. From the sooty trees, their leaves brown and gold in the autumn sunlight, rose flights of startled birds. In the distance a dog began to howl. Richard Cadogan went up to the target and inspected it in a dispirited sort of way. It bore no mark of any kind.

‘I missed it,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Extraordinary.’

Mr Spode, of Spode, Nutling, and Orlick, publishers of high-class literature, jingled the money in his trousers pocket – presumably to gain attention. ‘Five per cent on the first thousand,’ he remarked. ‘Seven and a half on the second thousand. We shan’t sell more than that. No advance.’ He coughed uncertainly.

Cadogan returned to his former position, inspecting the revolver with a slight frown. ‘One shouldn’t aim them, of course,’ he said. ‘One should fire them from the hip.’ He was lean, with sharp features, supercilious eyebrows, and hard dark eyes. This Calvinistic appearance belied him, for he was a matter of fact a friendly, unexacting, romantic person.

‘That will suit you, I suppose?’ Mr Spode continued. ‘It’s the usual thing.’ Again he gave his nervous little cough. Mr Spode hated talking about money.

Bent double, Cadogan was reading from a book which lay on the dry, scrubby grass at his feet. ‘“In all pistol shooting,”’ he enunciated, ‘“the shooter looks at the object aimed at and not at the pistol.” No. I want an advance. Fifty pounds at least.’

‘Why have you developed this mania for pistols?’

Cadogan straightened up with a faint sigh. He felt every month of his thirty-seven years. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It will be better if we both talk about the same subject at the same time. This isn’t a Chekhov play. Besides, you’re being evasive. I asked for an advance on the book – fifty pounds.’

‘Nutling…Orlick…’ Mr Spode gestured uncomfortably.

‘Both Nutling and Orlick are quite legendary and fabulous.’ Richard Cadogan was firm. ‘They’re scapegoats you’ve invented to take the blame for your own meanness and philistinism. Here am I, by common consent one of the three most eminent of living poets, with three books written about me (all terrible, but never mind that), lengthily eulogized in all accounts of twentieth-century literature…’