Blurbs for Edmund Crispin Mysteries

(Note: Books are listed alphabetically.)

Beware of the Trains (1953)

by Edmund Crispin

Penguin Books (1981)

Cover price: $2.95

• 'Who burglarized the train heading for Victoria Station, and whatever became of its conductor?
• 'Did the village idiot or Mrs. Foley murder the mean-spirited Edgar Foley, or could the constable be responsible for the devious deed?
• 'Who on earth will be able to untangle the affair of the disappearing car, the black necktie, and the abortive theft?

'Enter Gervase Fen, Oxford professor and sometime super-sleuth, an expert at solving cases that baffle even the most astute policeman. These sixteen short classics by a master of the modern detective story will test your crime-solving abilities as well; Edmund Crispin has provided all the clues you need to detect the solution, using logic and common sense. Can you meet the challenge?'

Moving Toyshop, The (1946)

by Edmund Crispin

Penguin Books (1958)

Cover price: $6.99

'It is late at night when poet Cadogan stumbles on the dead body of an old lady in an Oxford toyshop.

'The following morning the toyshop has vanished and in its place is a grocery store. Nobody, not even the police, seems surprised.

'How fortunate that Cadogan is a friend of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford and that most tenacious and perceptive of amateur sleuths. Fen is delighted to investigate a crime that seems not to exist. With a little inspiration and a few hunches, Fen discovers that the toyshop, the corpse and the motive are all very real indeed.'

"All his work had a high-spiritedness rare and welcome in the crime story." -- Julian Symons

"The book is a rococo classic. It has abundantly the pervasive charm of the genre." -- H. R. F. Keating in The Times