Before it became impossible, for the foreseeable future, to visit a physical bookstore, I went to a local shop in the next city and bought a book I’d had on my to-read list for a very long time: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin, an amusing mid-twentieth century Oxford murder mystery. The bookseller was delighted I was buying it and commanded me to come back when I’d read it. Now that I have, I do indeed plan to go back and buy another in the series (especially since the series suits my intention to read more books older than I am this year), although in our current state of emergency it’ll have to wait.
The plot concerns a bored poet, Richard Cadogan, who goes to Oxford in search of adventure and finds it, stumbling upon a dead body in the middle of the night. Near the end of the story, after a parade of suspects have given testimony of the events surrounding the murder, while the amateur detective Gervase Fen is assembling the solution, there is a striking moment during which the poet reflects seriously to himself after spending several dozen pages frantically running around after Fen and longing for a meal.
“Euthanasia, Cadogan thought: they all regard it as that, and not as wilful slaughter, not as the violent cutting-off of an irreplaceable compact of passion and desire and affection and will; not as a thrust into unimagined and illimitable darkness. He tried to see Havering’s face, but it was only a lean silhouette in the fading light. Something took root in him that in a week, a month, a year perhaps, would become poetry. He was suddenly excited and oddly content. The words of his predecessors in the great Art came to his mind. ‘They are all gone into the world of light.’ ‘I that in heill was and in gladnesse.’ ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s eye …‘ The vast and terrifying significance of death closed round him for a moment like the petals of a dark flower.”
Later, he declares to another character that this murder has given him more than enough of the adventure he so blithely sought at the story’s beginning.
“For excitement, give me a country walk any day; and I’m inclined to think there’s a good deal more adventure to be had by just opening the curtains in the morning. I dare say that sounds gutless and middle-aged, but after all, I am middle-aged, and there’s no escaping the fact; as a matter of fact, after today I welcome it. Being middle-aged means that you know what matters to you. All this business has been strictly meaningless to me, and from now on I shall conserve my energies, such as they are, for significant things. If ever I’m tempted by posters advertising cruises, I shall whisper ‘Sharman’; whenever I see headlines about international crooks, I shall whisper ‘Rosseter’. I eschew Poictesme and Logres now and for ever. In fact, in a couple of days I shall go back to London and start work again — though I’ve a nightmare feeling that this business isn’t over yet.”
Although we are only so far into what will be a who-knows-how-long period of distance and isolation, I’m already feeling an uncharacteristic itch to go out, to explore, to mingle, to connect. An insipid longing for adventure, something like Cadogan’s, but perhaps a misinterpretation of the desire for things to go back to the way they were. But it is wiser to be content, in my usual way, with the adventure of staying indoors. With the necessities, with the piles of books acquired against just this sort of emergency, with the privilege of merely opening the curtains and looking out the window onto the rest of the world.