The Moving Toyshop is a comic crime novel by Edmund Crispin

Edmund Crispin

Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery , an English crime writer and composer.-Life and work:Montgomery was born in Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire...

, published in 1946

1946 in literature

The year 1946 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*November 7 - Walker Percy marries Mary Bernice Townsend.*Launch in the United Kingdom of Penguin Classics under the editorship of E. V...

. The novel features the detective and Oxford don, Gervase Fen

Gervase Fen

Gervase Fen is a fictional amateur detective and Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature created by Edmund Crispin. Fen appears in nine novels and two books of short stories published between 1944 and 1979...

.

It is dedicated to the poet Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...

, Crispin's contemporary at St. John's College, Oxford. In chapter 10, reference is made to an undergraduate essay called "The Influence of Sir Gawain

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his...

on Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...

's Empedocles

Empedocles

Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements...

 on Etna", about which Fen comments: "Good heavens, that must be Larkin: the most indefatigable searcher out of pointless correspondences the world has ever known."

The final lines of the book quote Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

's The Rape of the Lock

The Rape of the Lock

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope, first published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany in May 1712 in two cantos , but then revised, expanded and reissued under Pope's name on March 2, 1714, in a much-expanded 5-canto version...

:

With varying vanities, from every part,

They shift the moving toyshop of their heart

In 2006 P.D. James picked it as one of her five most riveting crime novels.