In the 1930s and 1940s it was not unusual that movies were sometimes performed by the same actors on the radio for the Lux Radio Theater. One of the classic examples of this peculiar art form is this radio adaptation of "Miracle on 34th Street," broadcast on the CBS network on December 20, 1948 as a nice little Christmas present to the listening audience (the film had come out during the summer of the previous year). Most of the movie cast is reunited (with Natalie Wood the obvious exception, especially since she appears on the CD cover), with Edmund Gwenn as Chris Kringle, Maureen O'Hara as Doris, John Payne as Fred, Marlene Ames as Susan, Joseph Kearns as Sawyer, and Willard Waterman as Macy. The radio version is just as charming as the classic holiday film, which is required viewing on Thanksgiving weekend as we gear up for the holiday season. The broadcast runs one hour, including the original commercials for Lux Toiler Soap (would I make this up?). Try listening to this while you are working on decorations or holiday cooking since it is a feast for the ears that does not you to the race to the set every time one of your favorite scenes comes along (the ending is especially good in this version).

The critic Anthony Boucher once described the British writer and composer, Edmund Crispin (pseudonym for Robert Bruce Montgomery) as a "master of fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek mystery novels, a blend of John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, M.R. James, and the Marx Brothers."

"The Moving Toyshop," published in 1946, was Crispin's third Gervase Fen mystery. This particular whodunit involves an unusual will, a hunt for five eccentric characters named after the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, and of course, a moving toy shop with a corpse in its upper story. The action begins in the Autumn of 1938, when the poet, Richard Cadogan wangles an advance from his London publisher and sets out for a vacation in Oxford.

The reader begins to realize the oddity of the journey he has embarked upon with the poet, when Cadogan hitches a ride with truck driver who quotes Coleridge ("a thahsand, thahsand slimy things lived on and so did I.") but prefers D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Somebody's Lover."

We're entering Fen Country now, where even the truck drivers and police detectives are amateur literary critics, and our detective, Gervase Fen is the Oxford don of English Language and Literature. Dialogue fizzes with cynical witticisms and literary allusions when Fen and the poet, Cadogan go at it, or when Fen takes on any of a number of amateur classicists who populate "The Moving Toyshop."

All of Crispin's Fen mysteries can be read with pleasure for the dialogue alone. This particular book also has a full cast of British eccentrics, including the five Edward Lear characters (one of whom is a murderer).

Here is your first limerick-clue:

"There was an Old Person of Mold who shrank from sensations of Cold; so he purchased some muffs, some furs, and some fluffs, and wrapped himself up from the cold."

Racket through the streets (and sometimes the lawns) of Oxford in Fen's battered, red roadster, Lily Christine III! Make up limericks and shout them out to passing scholars! Join the hunt for the missing toyshop, the corpse, and the murderer! You will enjoy a sometimes farcical, always exhilarating ride.

"The Moving Toyshop" is Crispin on his own home turf (he was educated at St. John's College, Oxford), and at the top of his classical form.

This small volume might be the perfect gift for the aficionado who owns all the other important biographies on Mozart.

Norbert Elias was a sociologist by profession. Looking at the life of Mozart, he asked what influence did the society in which Mozart grew up have on his development as an artist. Elias did not try to explain the nature of genius in terms of sociology, as the subtitle of the US translation implies. Rather, he tried to put Mozart's genius in perspective. The German title of the book made this quite clear: "Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies", which translates roughly as "Mozart: Sociological aspects of a genius". The charm of the book really lies in the fact that Elias did not try to explain away the mystery of genius.

As a small extra for anyone who has ever wondered why so many important composers came from German speaking countries (Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, etc.), whereas France and England produced few composers of the same stature during this period, Elias's essay has a neat, little theory which provides some answers. It also warms the hearts of economists, by the way.

For those who like good, clean spy-type fun, this is a SUPERLATIVE work. Part three in the adventures of Richard Hannay (which started with Buchan's well-known "Thirty-nine Steps"), this is a first-rate thriller set on the eve of World War I, with plenty of atmosphere and hair-breadth escapes, plus an excellent dogfight climax in the skies over France. Along with everything else, it has some sound theological reflections (the title being a character from "Pilgrim's Progress") about courage and fortitude. Highly recommended.

Although renowned for his superb detective fantasies, Carr's masterpiece of history and detection (arguably the same philosophy) is his reconstruction of The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey. Despite an obvious anti-Whig bias and his adoration of Charles II, his historical method is excellent, drawing a most dramatically colourful picture of Restoration England and weighing up the odds impartially. The theories are brilliantly argued, and equally brilliantly demolished, and the final solution is quite convincing. Superb.

Carr is the greatest writer of classic detection fiction. He was also a hell of a history student and an unregenerate lover of derring do of the Robert Louis Stevenson/Alexander Dumas type (see some of his historical/detection/thrillers like The Bride of Newgate), and here he combines all sorts of history with the methods of classic detection in a thrilling tale. He writes this piece of history exactly as if it were a tale--which to him it of course was.

The story deals with the murder of a noted justice of the peace in the latter part of the 17th century in England, which is then used by the political enemies of Charles II as petext for a witch hunt against Catholics in general and to usurp Charles's power by forcing the nomination of Charles's illegitimate Protestant son as official heir, instead of his Catholic brother James. (Indeed, England is brought to the brink of Revolution again and only luck and Charle's saavy prevents it--Dryden, by the way, used these same events as the base of his great poem "Absalom and Architophel".)

The characters are vivid, especially Charles, Charles's enemies Buckingham and ? (been a while since I re-read it), Titus Oates, and the man who Carr believes actually committed the murder--just to mention a few. The reign of terror that the murder served as catalyst for is brought to life with frightening horror, and you'll cheer when Charles outwits and outmaneuvers his enemies in a masterpiece of political tactics.

Carr really makes you see and feel how fear makes people lose all reason and rationality, leading them to do terrible things. Very unfair things--after reading this book, you'll be more grateful than ever for the constitution. People were tortured, held incommunicado, scapegoated and sandbagged--you name it--in the most highhanded and blatant fashion.

Although Carr even incorporates extensively stuff from primary sources, especially from the transcripts of the trials of the many victims, ihis focus is always on telling a mystery/suspense story. As even Barzun and Taylor in their Catalogue of Crime had to admit (no great fans of Carr, they enthusiastically concede this book is a masterpiece), Carr can sum up evidence like no one else. He offers in conclusiton something like eight or ten likely culprits, then tells you who he thinks is the most likely villain.

Edmund Calamy (1678-1732), a dissenting minister in London and a historian, was the son and grandson of puritan ministers inside the Church of England. Both of them, along with hundreds of others, were expelled from their church livings for their refusal to submit to the 1662 Act of Uniformity. This event, the so-called 'Great Ejection', was a crucial moment in the formation of religious dissent in England. This book, first published in 1775, is an extensively-revised version, by another dissenting minister Samuel Palmer, of materials originally collated and published by Edmund Calamy, commemorating the lives and works of these ejected ministers.
Editing the autobiography of one of the most eminent of these ejected ministers, Richard Baxter, Calamy included a long chapter listing the ejected ministers and such biographical data as he could find. This is the famous chapter 9 of An Abridgment of Mr Baxter's History of his Life and Times (1702). This chapter became a whole volume of a second edition of the Abridgement published in 1713. And in 1727 Calamy produced a further two volumes of material under the title A Continuation of the Account of the Ministers, Lecturers, Masters and Fellows of Colleges, and Schoolmasters who were Ejected and Silenced after the Restoration of 1660...
Samuel Palmer attempted to integrate this material into a more readable form, making extensive revisions and additions. He certainly siucceeded in producing something more accessible to eighteenth-century readers and there were several reprints of the book and a second edition in 1802-3. However readability was sometimes at the cost of accuracy and of a reduction of the scholarly value of Calamy's material.
Nevertheless The Nonconformist's Memorial was an important work of collective memory by eighteenth-century dissenters.

¡Hi! I just wanted to comment that on last year, I had the fortune to meet Sir Edmund and his wife in my country, Chile, at Hotel Portillo, (a ski center, where on 1962 the world ski championship took place). I`m a climber and so are my sons and my father. We all met Sir Ed., and had beautifull pictures taken. I told him my dad who is now 83, still climbs every weekend. He congratulasted My dad and told him his knees, didn`t go with him for hiking now. He signed my vertion of this book, over the picture where he appears with George Lowe, going to a State banquet in London (page 64) Glad to meet you Guillermo Fuentes

Edmund Crispin (pseudonym for Bruce Montgomery) wrote "Obsequies at Oxford" in 1944 while he was still an undergraduate at St. John's College, Oxford. It features the advent of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire. Another of my favorite characters, the deaf and possibly senile Professor Wilkes also appears for the first time and tells a ghost story right before the first murder occurs. A story within a story. A mystery within a mystery.

Fen solves both the mystery of the "Obsequies at Oxford," and the mystery within the ghost story.

Crispin specialized in creating 'impossible' murders for his Oxford don to investigate. A murder usually acquires the label 'impossible' at the death scene, when someone blurts out, "No one could have gotten past the gate keeper (or into the locked room or through the sky light). This is impossible!"

In "Obsequies at Oxford," we have:

"...Accident practically impossible. And murder, apparently, quite impossible. So the only conclusion is---

"The only conclusion is," put in the Inspector, "that the thing never happened at all."

Now Fen is off and running! A whole troupe of actors and actresses had motives for killing their colleague, and all of them (of course) have alibis.

The story begins when playwright Robert Warner mounts his latest experimental drama at the Oxford Repertory Theatre. His previous play bombed in London and he wants to try out "Metromania" in the provinces before opening it on the West End. His current mistress accompanies him to Oxford, and he unwisely gives his former mistress a role in his new play. Both ladies have other admirers. Their admirers have admirers. In fact, it's hard to keep track of who loves whom without a score card---or in this case, a playbill.

Although its characters sometimes sound frivolous and superficial (and very funny), "Obsequies at Oxford" also concerns itself with the gap between outward, conventional appearances and the inner turmoil that triggered a murder. All of the suspects have valid, psychological reasons for wanting the victim to die, but Fen is skeptical about crimes committed for hate or love:

"I don't believe in the 'crime passionel,' particularly when the passion appears, as in this case, to be chiefly frustration. Money, vengeance, security: there are your plausible motives, and I shall look for one of them."

If you agree with Fen, then you will be able to eliminate ninety percent of the suspects. If you're like me, you'll keep blundering off after red herrings until All is Explained at novel's end. The author doesn't cheat---you'll get all of the clues ahead of the final denouement.

"Obsequies at Oxford" is both a tightly constructed mystery and a literate, witty, British comedy of manners.

NOTE: "Obsequies at Oxford" was also published under the title, "The Case of the Gilded Fly."

Professor Brough delivers Husserl to English-reading audiences with remarkable flair.

Seventy-year-old English writer John Charles lives a comfortable life in France. However, John's quiet lifestyle is abruptly shattered when a bullet is fired at his cottage from an unknown assailant. Subsequently, a man dressed in threads similar to what John enjoys wearing is found dead. Finally, John's beloved home is burned to the ground.

Rather than visit the police, the invigorated John flees across the continent to escape his enemies, even as he tries to learn their identities. However, his unknown foes are in close pursuit and they know a lot about what makes John ticks as his past threatens to catch up to him. His enemies will kill him if they ever catch up to him.

ONE MORE RIVER is great personal thriller that digs deep into the mind of the victim. The story line hooks the reader early and never lets go until the novel is finished. The book effortlessly switches back and forth between first and third person without missing a beat and, in fact, propels the terrific tale forward. Nicolas Freeling demonstrates the depth of his talent with this brilliantly written, fast-paced novel that is outside the author's normal realm (police procedural starring Inspector Castang). This reviewer recommends this novel and the author's Castang books because they are all quite enjoyable.

Harriet Klausner