Freeman Wills Crofts | The Cask | The Ponson Case | The Pit-Prop Syndicate | The Short Stories | Inspector French's Greatest Case | The Sea Mystery | The Box Office Murders | Fatal Venture | Death of a Train
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
The Cask (1920)
The Sea Mystery (1928) (Chapters 1-3)
The Box Office Murders (1929)
The Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express
Freeman Wills Crofts' mystery novels were highly influential:
Crofts has a beautiful prose style, clear and vivid. Crofts' stories have an even flowing tone, that reminds one of Hawthorne. They march steadily on, without climax or structure, steadily, step by step unveiling his mystery plots and descriptions of events.
Crofts was one of the founders and most influential members of what we have been calling the Realist school of detective fiction in this Guide. For an overview of the Realist school, please see the linked article.
The Cask (1920) was Crofts' first novel, and a hugely popular book. The Cask still is Crofts' best and most important piece of fiction. If you have not read Crofts, The Cask is the best place to start.
Four features of The Cask are especially notable:
The Cask contains the first of what will be a Crofts specialty: the alibi plot. A suspect will have an alibi that makes it look impossible for them to have committed the crime. An investigator will research every aspect of the alibi, talking to witnesses, retracing movements, and constructing time tables. All of this will simply make the alibi look more solid. Finally, the investigator will discover a way in which the alibi could be faked.
Such alibi puzzles have a link to the impossible crime. Both alibi and impossible crime plots make it look impossible for someone to have committed a murder - whereas the solution ingeniously shows it actually is possible. Both types of story are pure, fair play puzzle plots. Alibis are not usually considered impossible crimes. Despite their broad similarities to impossible crime mysteries, they are usually considered a different sub-genre of detection.
The alibis in The Cask and its immediate successor, The Ponson Case (1921), do not depend on that popular staple of the Realist school, "the breakdown of identity". In other words, they do not depend on impersonation, multiple identities, mistaken identifications, or other manipulations of identity to create an alibi.
Instead, the central alibi puzzle in The Cask, and Cosgrove's alibi in The Ponson Case, center on "location and technology": the ability of modern technology to do unusual things with the location of people.
The Ponson Case (1921) is an ultimately disappointing book from Freeman Wills Crofts. It starts out well, with a beautifully written account of a summer evening at an English Country Mansion - that much discussed but seldom seen setting for Golden Age mysteries. Soon, Sir William Ponson is found dead. Who killed him? There are only three suspects, his noble son Austin, his bad-boy London playboy nephew Cosgrove, and the Mysterious Stranger whose footprints are all over the crime scene. Inspector Tanner tracks down all three men's movements for the next 300 pages. This being Crofts, both Austin and Cosgrove have alibis.
The Ponson Case has two big problems. One, is there is little ingenuity of plot. The solution is a disappointment, the map of the countryside turns out to have nothing to do with the mystery, the Big Surprise about Sir William being blackmailed is obvious to every reader 250 pages before Scotland Yard tumbles to it, the subject of the blackmail is easy to guess, and a child of five would not be fooled by Austin's alibi.
Only Cosgrove's alibi shows ingenuity. One wishes that Crofts had included this alibi in a separate novella. It would make fun reading. The alibi is stated at the very end of Chapter 6, and investigated in Chapters 7 and 10.
The other problem is the racial slurs, something I don't recall seeing elsewhere in Crofts. By the time he insults the entire population of Portugal, it is time to give up on this book.
Inspector Tanner is an interesting character, and quite different from the later Inspector French. Tanner is a sneak, a liar, and a devious conman, who likes to dress up as a rich guy and fool suspects. Tanner is right out of the Rogue tradition of clever crooks who use underhanded schemes to swindle rich people - only Tanner performs his actions to trip up murder suspects. I've never seen a Scotland Yard man behave like this. One wishes Tanner were in a better book. I also liked his breezy tobacconist friend (Chapter 7), who aids him in identifying cigarettes.
After his initial triumph with the alibi plot in The Cask, Crofts turned to stories in which the physical properties of means of transportation, such as trains and ships, became important. The tales are only moderately successful, compared with The Cask, but they have their merits. The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922) is a mystery-cum-thriller, in which two men investigate a strange business. The storytelling in the book drags, but the solution of the mystery shows considerable mechanical ingenuity.
A fair proportion of The Pit-Prop Syndicate is taken up with a complex criminal scheme similar to the one in Crofts' later The Box Office Murders (1929). There are even technological gimmicks used in common in both books. A great deal of other kinds of material are included in The Pit-Prop Syndicate, however, and they are unfortunately inferior to the ingenious criminal scheme. There is a murder and its endless investigation, only marginally relevant to the crime scheme. The book stops to switch gears while the amateur investigators of the early chapters are replaced by the policemen of the later ones. There is a romance subplot, innocuous but stilted. By the time The Pit-Prop Syndicate is done, a good novella about a clever crime scheme (at around a third of the length of the existing novel), has been padded out into an often very dull novel with a little bit of everything. Still the crime scheme is well done, and the book forms an interesting pair with The Box Office Murders. When he came to write the second book, Crofts wisely concentrated on a single subject, and a single professional detective investigating it.
You can also learn a lot about motorbiking, boating, shipping and traveling in remote regions of France in this story: the settings are as rural as those of The Cask are urban. The plot is best followed through an atlas, and is set in a realistic geography. It is atmospheric in showing its heroes' journey through a deserted region of the French countryside. The Europe of the book is one in which people can travel anywhere, by boat or motorbike; it seems to be a universally commercial land, devoted to business enterprises; it seems profoundly at peace, in way that it will not be again for 70 years.
"The Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express" (1921), is apparently Crofts' earliest short story. It has been widely reprinted as a "classic". But I have to confess that I was simply unable to understand the story. It depends heavily on the physical properties of trains and railway engines of the era, and I am simply too ignorant about these things to follow the tale. This story cries out for multi-media extension, with photographs and diagrams of period trains, glossaries of technical terms, and a detailed commentary on Crofts' solution, which I found especially incomprehensible. This is not intended as a criticism of Crofts' work, just as an indication of a specialized technical subject that has now vanished into the mists of time. However, I am not sure that even if I understood this story, I would enjoy any mystery given such a purely technical solution.
The best short story by Crofts I have read is "The Greuze" (1921). This is a tale of ingenious rogues, but it is not so much in the Raffles-Arsène Lupin tradition of the Rogue School. Although it deals with crime, not murder, it falls closer to the classic puzzle plot mystery, and shows admirable misdirection.
"The Hunt Ball", a later short story, is a mild inverted tale. It contains a good clue, but only one of them, and is certainly no classic.
Two of the Detection Club's round robins have recently been published in a single volume, the novella length "Behind the Screen" (1930), and the novel The Scoop (1931). The majority of the contributors to both works were British realists of the era: Dorothy L. Sayers, E.C. Bentley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Father Ronald Knox. The plot of The Scoop has some ingenuity, although the villain is easily guessable early on. The second half of the novel seems padded, although Crofts does some nice work on alibis in his Chapter 11. Crofts' sections introduce a Scotland Yard inspector, with what is surely a piece of self conscious humor on his part - what else would anyone expect a Crofts section to be about?
Inspector French's Greatest Case (1924), the novel that introduces Crofts' series detective French, is a return to the style, if not the quality of The Cask. This book is just plain terrible. It is not in any way offensive, but it is remarkably mediocre. The endless travels around Europe tracking down suspects are pointless and boring, the puzzle plot is nearly non-existent, and the characters are ciphers. French himself comes across as the least interesting sleuth in mystery history. He is a deliberately personalityless character, perhaps intended as a corrective against The Eccentric Sleuth, but one which has gone way too far.
The best parts of The Sea Mystery (1928) are the opening chapters, which show the discovery of the body, and Inspector French's reconstruction of part of the crime. Despite the book's title, these are the only parts of the story that take place on the water - the remainder of the book takes place on dry land. They have a magical, lyrical quality that the rest of the book lacks. They are also the only parts of the book concerned with pure detection. French uses logic, reasoning and science and engineering skills to reconstruct a very mysterious looking crime; these sections are a gem of pure detection. These chapters anticipate in tone Crofts' immediately following novel, The Box Office Murders (1929). Warning: Chapter 2 refers to the events of The Cask, with considerable wit and self referential pizzazz, but also giving away much of the plot of that book. So don't read this until you have read Crofts' classic Cask.
The rest of the book is a Golden Age detective novel, with French trying to explore a maze like puzzle plot involving a multiple disappearance. Unfortunately, Crofts' plot twists here are not too baffling, or too original either. He is in there trying, however, and these later sections sometimes have their moments.
Freeman Wills Crofts' The Box Office Murders (1929) is an unusual book for the Golden Age. Despite its title, it is hardly focused on murder. Mainly, it is a story of three crooks who are in charge of a big crime scheme, which somehow centers on theater box offices. The story revolves around Inspector French's attempts to uncover the nature of this crime scheme, and gather evidence against the trio. Although the three commit murder to protect their scheme, the murders are almost irrelevant to the story, which focuses on French's efforts to unravel the Big Scheme, instead. There is no whodunit aspect to the tale - the three crooks are identified right at the start of the story - and little mystery surrounding the killings. Instead, the mysteries in the tale surround the crime Scheme itself. What is it? How is pulled off technologically - there is a great deal of technological and engineering detail in the story. How is it organized? There is also a great deal of emphasis in the novel on police detective work. French comes up with an endless number of ingenious ways to gather evidence against the crooks. The book is 250 pages of pure detection.
Evaluating the quality of The Box Office Murders is a bit difficult. The work is very readable: in fact I downed most of it in a single sitting, which is quite unusual for the often labored Crofts. It gains big plusses from being a logically organized exposition of a single theme. There is almost no padding in the novel: every chapter has something new to add to the big picture. Some of French's detective work is fascinating, and it is really pleasant to see such a determined approach to detection, which is too often neglected today. However, the book can get repetitive, and is narrowly focused: there is little in the way of characterization, there is little plot in the conventional sense, and most of the whodunit mechanism of the Golden Age is simply missing. The work can seem thin, and even trivial. It is nowhere as rich as Crofts' classic The Cask (1920). However, Crofts deserves big plusses for trying something original, and for pulling it off so well.
If Crofts' book seems largely sui generis in Golden Age detective fiction, it does have an important ancestor within his own work: The Pit-Prop Syndicate, which contains a somewhat similar crime scheme.
Crofts includes a Jewish character among the police early on in the tale. While the character occurs only in passing, it makes its point: Jews are good guys, and deeply integrated into British institutions. It is a welcome contrast to the anti-Semitic portrayals that are all too common in British popular fiction of its era - see, for example, the dreadful Henry Wade.
While The Box Office Murders concerns a crime scheme, it has little to do with the Rogue literature of the previous generation. Rogue stories tend to focus tightly on the personalities of their crooks, with especial emphasis on their cleverness, their tweaking the nose of authority, etc. Crofts, in contrast, focuses on the crime scheme itself, and its technological and organizational features. The class element that is so important in Rogue stories is also altered here. Rogue stories tend to have lower class crooks who take on the clothes and personas of upper class members. Crofts' characters instead are explicitly identified by him as members of the lower middle classes. Inspector French himself seems petit bourgeois, and the story is one of the most relentlessly and unusually middle class of all Golden Age novels. The criminals seem in fact like tradesmen or small businessmen, and French at one point compares them to "industry in the British Isles", a memorable and apt comparison.
French is somewhat better characterized here than in his debut novel, the dreary, and unfortunately titled, Inspector French's Greatest Case (1924). Here, at least, he comes across as extremely tenacious, emotionally involved in his work, ingenious at coming up with schemes for detection, and somewhat slippery in his dealings with the public.
One thing seems odd: while the bad guys seem to have great technical and engineering resources, the police seem to have none. At one point, French explicitly yearns for the skills of a Dr. Thorndyke. Well, why couldn't he get them? It seems amazing, but Crofts' novel suggests that in 1929, Scotland Yard seems to still have nothing resembling a police laboratory, or any scientists it can turn to for help in its investigations. The police in the book do have great organizational skills, just like the criminals, but they are completely lacking their scientific expertise. This leads to a serious imbalance in the story. Only the crooks in the novel get the benefit of Crofts' technological imagination. Because this is the heart of the tale, in some ways the crooks come across as the real protagonists of the story.
Oddly enough, while The Cask is a puzzle plot and The Box Office Murders is not, The Cask seems much more realistic than the other book, which seems more like a fantasy of The Perfect Crime. Also, the investigative procedure in The Cask also seems much more authentic, although I admit this personal impression is not based on any genuine knowledge on my part of police procedure in the 1920's. French's detectival technique in The Box Office Murders seems largely designed to unravel cunning criminal conspiracies, and such conspiracies seem to me to be basically a fictional fantasy. By contrast, the police techniques in The Cask look as if they could be used to solve real life crimes.
The Box Office Murders has an advantage over its predecessor The Pit-Prop Syndicate, in that all of the detection is done by pros. The amateurs of the early chapters of The Pit-Prop Syndicate were always having their investigative hands tied by their amateur status. That book's crime could have been solved much earlier (and more entertainingly) if some professional police had taken charge, with warrants to search everything and investigate all. French's full frontal assault on the conspiracy in The Box Office Murders is much more satisfying as a logical approach to investigating such a situation.
Some of the crooks' schemes remind one technologically of R. Austin Freeman's Danby Croker stories, especially "The Brazen Serpent". Crofts was very influenced by Freeman; and the references to him here, as in The Cask, are clearly intended as a homage. There is also some technological similarity to Meade and Eustace, who stand behind Freeman in the scientific detective story tradition. M&E's crooks engage in industrial enterprises, too; they emphasize means of communication; and they pioneered the sinister use of basements: all features found in The Box Office Murders. It is odd to see such continuity across nearly 30 years in time. The heavy involvement of women in the tale, both as villains and protagonists, is also an M&E tradition. There are other signs of continuity between M&E and the Croftsian school, perhaps through Eustace, who was active through the 20's. His "The Tea-Leaf" (1925) has a similar setting as Wade's slightly later "The Three Keys", and Dorothy L. Sayers was collaborating with Eustace, and pointing out M&E's pioneering role in the school of scientific detection.
Crofts' novel does seem somewhat anticipatory of later Big Caper tales, wherein thieves plot some big heist from a museum, say, complete with careful organization, and some technological gimmickry. This was a subject that was popular in post World War II movies. However, Big Caper tales tend to focus on one-time events, such as a major robbery, whereas Crofts' book deals with an ongoing criminal enterprise; and Big Caper tales have the thieves as protagonists, whereas Crofts' hero is the police detective French.
Crofts' book also shows some similarities to the drug smuggling episodes in such books as Sayers' Murder Must Advertise (1933) and Christie's Partners in Crime (1929). However, if these writers show some of Crofts' interest in criminal organization, they are miles away from his technological interests and skills. Crofts' books are also oddly like the Stratemeyer syndicate novels: Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys are always meeting suspicious characters, whose sinister schemes they have to track down. Just as in Crofts' books, the issue of whodunit does not apply: the crooks are identified early on. And just like in Crofts' tales, the issue is not murder, but some disreputable money making scheme. Crofts also has mild thriller elements, just like the Stratemeyer books. At the end, a young woman gets kidnapped by the bad guys, just like the ending of dozens of Nancy Drew stories. Even Crofts compares this with numerous "thrillers" read by the young lady in question. Crofts shows a feminist slant here, burlesquing these thrillers' passive heroines and male rescues; his own heroine has to show a lot more gumption. Even during these well done thriller sequences, Crofts continues to paint a picture of the technological and organizational aspects of his villains' crime scheme. His kidnapped heroine, too, has to show an imagination that is largely technological.
Fatal Venture (1939) is known as Tragedy in the Hollow in the United States. The whole book reminds one of Crofts' idol, R. Austin Freeman. Like many of Freeman's books, the story falls into two parts, one part showing events from the point of view of a young man, the second showing the mystery solved by the detective. The young hero of the story innocently covers up elements of the crime, to protect his girlfriend. Later we see Inspector French uncover these. The whole thing reminds one of one of Freeman's inverted stories, with the detective finding clues to unravel a crime we have already seen. Finally, in the last section of the story, Crofts finally gets down to his own specialty, the breaking down of alibis. Even here, the technological aspects remind one of Freeman.
Fatal Venture suffers from the fact that so much of the book has nothing to do with the mystery. Nearly the entire first half deals in detail with a scheme to launch a cruise ship that would travel round the British Isles. Crofts loved boats, and he goes into this scheme with enormous gusto. It is almost as if Crofts were writing the book to outline a real life business venture. These parts are readable and entertaining. However, they deal with a fantasy of Crofts', unlike The Cask, which shows us part of the real world, Paris and the shipping business. As in Freeman's Death at the Inn (1937), this book has an anti-gambling theme, with gambling in Fatal Venture being part of the cruise ship scheme.
When the murder does finally occur on page 93, it takes place on shore, during a tourist excursion to Northern Ireland, and the whole cruise ship aspect of the book has nothing to do with the crime. In many ways, the actual mystery portions of the book would form a short story, and only the non-mystery sections expand the work to novel length. Freeman's Mr. Polton Explains (1940) will also combine a mainstream, non-mystery first half with a mystery novel second half.
The book shows the ambiguity with which British writers viewed business. Crofts is gung ho about his business scheme. He is one of the few Golden Age British novelists to take an interest in business. The book is rich in detail about business negotiations were conducted, and how new enterprises were formed in the 1930's. But he also shows his businessmen to be grasping and amoral, and much of the business enterprise to be immoral. Americans today tend to think of a "booming economy" in which every economic advance helps other people also make money. Crofts asserts however that "one man's profit is another man's loss", and depicts business as a zero sum game with winners and losers.
The young hero wears uniform on ship, something to which he is not really entitled, but which pleases him no end - see the start of Chapter 6. There are elements of Rogue fiction tradition here, and the way Rogues like to assume the clothes of the upper classes as part of their schemes. This recalls other Rogue-influenced characters in Crofts, such as:
Part One tells of the creation of special train to carry secret material during World War II, and its sabotage by Nazi spies. This half is almost a pure train story: the creation and wrecking of the train, and the investigation afterwards by a railroad specialist. It is mainly of interest to train buffs, but nicely done, with Crofts' professional railway expertise loading the story with vivid detail.
This part also involves some police counter-espionage schemes, which are in the light-hearted Rogue tradition.
Part Two centers on Inspector French, and contains three mysteries. These all relate to the train - but have little connection with each other. Also disappointing: they really do not draw on most of the plot or characters seen in Part One.