The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
This is an English detective novel from the 40s set in Oxford, a very attractive premise. It's also published by Impedimenta, which is pretty much a seal of approval for me.
I really enjoyed the two protagonists, their very English banter and the setting of the crime: a man finds a murdered woman in a toyshop in Oxford but the next morning the toyshop is gone, replaced by a completely different business. More than a crime novel, this reads more like a buddy comedy of a loser poet and a maverick literature professor that enjoys the intellectual challenge of detective work.
The author is clearly extremely well-versed in classic literature and uses a barrage of references to do jokes and draw parallelisms with the story. I'm not gonna lie, most of them flew over my head and if it wasn't for the translator's footnotes, I wouldn't even had known they were references. The sense of humour is extremely British and the best part about the book. The Oxford he paints is equal parts romanticized and demystified, it's full of romantic, snobby, flawed but endearing characters.
For me it felt short on the detective side of things, the mystery cleverly plays with the idea of a Christie style perfect crime but ultimately it wasn't very interesting and it had too much exposition in the resolution.
I understand why this is such a well-regarded classic, it's very funny, clever and it decorates a standard genre plot with high-literature flourishes. For a book from 1946 I think it would translate very well to a BBC 6 episode series. I don't think I'll continue reading the series, but I would recommend it to bookish fans of the genre.