Dublin-born Freeman Wills Crofts played a major role in the development of detective fiction during its Golden Age, a period defined mainly by British authors in the years between the two world wars. With his successful debut, The Cask (1920), Crofts was front and center of this group, many of whom are still celebrated today. He was a prolific author whose sales figures rivaled the bestsellers of the period, yet he remains largely omitted from discussions of Irish crime fiction. A contemporary of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Crofts’s books remain in print, but his reputation has failed to match that of these luminaries. The low-profile nature of his fictional detectives and pacing of his plots are certainly contributing factors to this and to limiting his work’s screen adaptations. Unlike Christie’s cast of characters in particular, Crofts’s fictional Inspector French failed to successfully morph from print to celluloid. The lack of drama in Crofts’s personal life correlated directly with a low news-media profile. Marital affairs, divorces, or sensational disappearing acts were not to feature during his writing career, but Crofts matched his colleagues when it came to plot structure, and this—specifically the inverted mystery—is what made his detective novels popular during the Golden Age and explains why he remains a key figure in crime fiction today.
Crofts and his fellow members of the Detection Club (including Sayers, Christie, and G. K. Chesterton) have become synonymous with this era in the same way Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain are taken to represent the hard-boiled American genre. Although frequently referred to as a “humdrum” writer from the school of police procedurals, Crofts had the ability to adapt this style to incorporate the inverted mystery, a back-to-front work that cross-fertilizes a study of criminal behavior with a detective story.
Crofts was born in Dublin in 1879 to an army surgeon, also named Freeman Wills Crofts, and his wife Cecilia Frances Wise. His father died on duty in Honduras before young Crofts was born. After a short time in Dublin, Crofts and his mother moved to Belfast when she remarried in 1883. Educated at the Methodist and Campbell colleges in the city, Crofts seemed destined for a career in engineering, having secured an apprenticeship in 1896 with his uncle, Berkeley D. Wise, chief engineer on the Belfast & Northern Counties Railway. By 1910 he had risen to the role of chief engineer of the Northern Counties Committee Railway. Not unlike Hammett’s entrance into fiction, an illness suffered by Crofts in 1919, followed by a period of convalescence, gave him the time to devote to writing a novel. He completed the manuscript after his recovery, and submitted the final draft to Collins, who published The Cask in 1920. The Cask marks the beginning of a writing career that spanned thirty-seven years, up to Anything to Declare?, published in 1957, the year of his death. A prolific author, Crofts averaged a book for every year, with Inspector French featuring in thirty titles.
With the recent Golden Age of Scandinavian noir or indeed the Golden Age of Irish crime fiction, it might be harder to identify a time when the crime and mystery genres were not covered in gilt. That gilt can imply the dawn of the genre, but Victorian and Edwardian exponents such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, and Émile Gaboriau—all of whom retain their popularity—predated the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Contrary to its sometimes staid reputation, the Golden Age was an era of experimentation in forms of detection writing and in audience engagement with the genre. Audience participation was popularized by the competition story, of which Edgar Wallace was an early exponent, with mixed results. In Wallace’s locked-room mystery, The Four Just Men (1905), British Foreign Secretary Sir Philip Ramon is killed at a predicted time (8 o’clock) after his life was threatened by the vigilante group “The Four Just Men.” Ramon’s death occurred while he was in a secure environment surrounded by a police guard. Wallace left the case unsolved, and “the publishers invite[d] the reader to solve this mystery and offer prizes to the value of £500 (first prize £250) to the readers who will furnish on the form provided the explanation of Sir Philip Ramon’s death.” Unfortunately, Wallace underestimated the ingenuity of his audience, many of whom submitted the correct answer, thus bankrupting the author when income generated from sales failed to match the expenditure of payouts.
Audience engagement also took the form of contributory novels (or round-robins), which begin in the Golden Age and remain popular nearly a century later, particularly within the location-specific subgenre. As a member of the Detection Club, Crofts contributed to the round-robin novel The Floating Admiral (1931). Referred to in its introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers as “the detection game as played out on paper by certain members of the Detection Club among themselves,”the work includes twelve chapters written by twelve different club members including Chesterton, Christie, and Sayers. Contributors had to write a chapter to follow the previous one without any collaboration on the final outcome of the story. Each author then submitted their solutions at the end of the text. The members were to collaborate again in 1936 with Six Against the Yard and the Gollancz publication Double Death (1939), which, unlike the earlier collaboration, also included contributions from nonmembers such as Anthony Armstrong. Double Death would further cement the Detection Club’s prominence in the public mind.
The origins of the Detection Club can be traced to the late 1920s. Complete with its own constitution, rules, and initiation ceremony, the Club invited crime writers of two or more titles (with some exceptions) to join as members and help develop the genre. How seriously the authors took their attachment to the Club is open to scrutiny. As part of the initiation ceremony, for example, members had to swear what seems a slightly tongue-in-cheek oath composed by Sayers: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?” The fact that members had to swear an oath, let alone its wording, suggests the Club is best described as a loose gathering of authors with an irreverent or humorous slant. It is hard to argue however with the talent among the members. Along with Sayers, early club members included Chesterton, G. D. H. Cole, M. Cole, Christie, Anthony Berkeley, and Crofts’s fellow Irish member, Mrs. Victor Rickard. A prolific author of fiction and history, Rickard is perhaps best known for her detective novel Not Sufficient Evidence (1926), which is oddly absent from the National Library of Ireland.
Sayers’s oath was in response to Detection Club member Ronald A. Knox’s introduction to The Best Detective Stories of the Year 1928 (1929), which included a set of ten rules—his Decalogue—that codified what became known as the Fair Play conventions of the genre:
1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues upon which he may happen to light.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
Knox’s fifth rule stands out for its directness. Christopher Frayling suggests this was in response to the success Sax Rohmer enjoyed with his Fu-Manchu stories, which were also often guilty of shattering the second rule on a consistent basis. Although Crofts tried to obey Knox’s amusing rules of detective fiction, and his inverted stories can be viewed to some extent as examples of Fair Play, their very structure fails to adhere to Knox’s first rule. Crofts—who, like Knox, had a strong religious faith—created protagonists who were a good deal less scrupulous about the original Ten Commandments revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. In Antidote to Venom (1938) alone there is evidence of murder (obviously), extramarital affairs, gambling, and deceit.
Well before the Detection Club or Antidote to Venom, Crofts’s writing career was firmly established by the enormous success of The Cask, which sold well over one hundred thousand copies worldwide. The Cask introduces Inspector Burnley of Scotland Yard who is alerted to strange happenings on the docks in London. Arriving from France on board the steamship Bullfinch, a heavy cask splits as it is being unloaded on the dockside to reveal its bounty: a hoard of gold sovereigns. Digging further, the workers, while filling their pockets, uncover a woman’s hand. On arrival at the scene, Burnley learns of the cask’s disappearance and so begins the tale that proved so popular in the 1920s.
Three more novels appeared in the next three years: The Ponson Case (1921), The Pit-Prop Syndicate (1922), and The Groote Park Murder (1923). Crofts was on a roll. Further success came in 1924 with Inspector French’s Greatest Case, which marked the first appearance of Crofts’s most celebrated character, Inspector Joseph French of Scotland Yard. Howard Haycraft describes this bestseller as “a volume worthy in almost every way to find its place on the shelf beside The Cask.” The case in question revolves around a theft and murder at a London diamond merchant. Scotland Yard are alerted and the first appearance of Inspector French in print ensues. Much of what was to become familiar in later French titles can be found here, not least a persistent detective working the leads and descriptive passages of locations (France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland), including carefully detailed shipping and rail timetables. Crofts’s passion for travel, which featured in many of his titles, is very much evident here.
The Inspector who was to become associated with Crofts’s career is “a stout man in tweeds, rather under middle height, with a clean shaven, good-humoured face and dark blue eyes, which, though keen, twinkled as if at some perennially fresh private joke. His air was easy-going and leisurely, and he looked the type of man who could enjoy a good dinner.” Though his Inspector may have seemed “perennially fresh,” further health issues prevented Crofts himself from continuing in his dual role as writer and railway engineer. He sacrificed the latter and moved to the village of Blackheath near Guildford, Surrey in 1929, where he concentrated on his writing, later moving in 1953 to Worthing in southeast England to avail of its temperate climate as his health further deteriorated. Upon his death in 1957, Crofts bequeathed the copyright of his works to the Royal Society of Arts, which had elected him a Fellow in 1939, in order to help struggling authors.
From early in this long career, Crofts was among the very first advocates of the inverted mystery, “in which the identity of the murderer or criminal is given away at the beginning.”From early in this long career, Crofts was among the very first advocates of the inverted mystery, “in which the identity of the murderer or criminal is given away at the beginning.” Richard Austin Freeman, a contemporary of Crofts, pioneered the inverted fiction format with The Red Thumb Mark (1907). This was his first work to feature Dr. Thorndyke, and is generally regarded as the first example of an inverted mystery story.Much like competition stories, this format was designed to include and engage the reading audience, who enjoy full knowledge of the circumstances of the crime and can concentrate on the unraveling of the case, which moves from “whodunit” to “howcatchem.” Knowledge is power, and with inverted mysteries, authors offer their readers the feeling of participation. The inverted mystery is probably most associated today with the television show Columbo (1971–2003), whose creators—William Link and Richard Levinson—used this device to announce the arrival of their pioneering and long-serving police lieutenant. Inspector French and Lieutenant Columbo share much in common. Both characters, while humble, are dogged in their pursuit of murderers. In his inverted works, Crofts builds the storyline and establishes the plot long before French appears on the scene. The initial result was The 12.30 from Croydon (1934). Publishers Hodder & Stoughton issued three more of Crofts’s inverted mysteries—Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), Antidote to Venom, and The Affair at Little Wokeham (1943)—as well as Murderers Make Mistakes (1947), a collection of inverted stories.
In between the publication of the novels and short stories, Todd Publishing Company (London) reissued Crofts’s inverted tale The Hunt Ball Murder (1944) as an illustrated pamphlet. As he does in many of the titles, Inspector French appears late in this text. It is not until page 13 (of only 16) that French (now Chief Inspector) enters the story to solve the murder of Justin Holt and arrest Howard Skeffington for the act. There are two further matters of interest in this story: a rare attempt by Crofts at humor in describing French and Sergeant Carter’s efforts at reconstructing the murder; and his use of clue finders where he addresses the reader directly, asking, “Where had Skeffington given himself away?” He had made greater use of this device, steeped in the tradition of Fair Play, in The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933), where at the end of the text French directs the reader back to the actual pages where he made progress in the case.
Crofts’s works featuring Inspector French not only satisfied a public demand for crime fiction, they were also well received by critics in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Favorable reviews for his early works were published in the New Republican, Outlook, and New Statesman. On the publication of Sir John Magill’s Last Journey (1930), the Irish Book Lover (1909) refers to Crofts’s reputation as “the greatest writer of detective fiction.” Although he was deemed worthy of comment in the United States, his Stateside reputation and popularity failed to match that in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Features on Crofts and his work often cite Raymond Chandler as an admirer. The evidence is largely based upon one line in Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950), which refers to Crofts as “the soundest builder of them [Golden Age authors] all, when he doesn’t get too fancy.” While the description suggests Crofts’s plots are elaborate in structure and somewhat intricate, it does not quite portray Chandler as a paid-up member of the Crofts fan club, and leaves the reader wondering just how much Chandler really admired Crofts. It could even be argued that as backhanded compliments go, this one, like Chandler’s fictional detective Marlowe, takes some beating.
It could even be argued that as backhanded compliments go, this one, like Chandler’s fictional detective Marlowe, takes some beating.Chandler’s background would suggest he was well versed on the canon of Golden Age writing. Born in Chicago, he received his education at Dulwich public school and later contributed book reviews, essays, and even verse to London literary periodicals. The fact that he was thoroughly familiar with the genre makes his often-quoted line on Crofts all the more lukewarm. Further evidence of his opinion on Crofts can be seen in a letter written in 1948 to James Keddie in which he suggests that “no normal reader could solve a Crofts mystery because no normal reader has that exact a memory for insignificant details.” Later correspondence with Keddie in 1950 shows no sign of Chandler reappraising the author’s ability, referring to Crofts’s writing as dull.
Criticism of Crofts’s style is valid. His later works were not always well received and the quality of his output is uneven. As a writer, he leaves himself open to accusations of overindulgence in describing irrelevant detail. Consider this passage from Mystery on Southampton Water: “Did the Chief-Inspector know anything of the manufacture of cement? French’s ideas were of the haziest. Very well, roughly what happened was that chalk and earths of various kinds were mixed and ground with water into a slurry.” It is crying out for the blue pencil of a heavy-handed editor. There are many more examples of this overly descriptive style in his writing. Yet Crofts’s talent is also in the detail and his plots rely heavily on descriptions of what appear to be watertight alibis. Although much enjoyment is gained from observing how Inspector French arrives at the solution, the journey there could have been spared the extraneous detail and described in more direct prose—typically the reader ambles, rarely sprinting, with French minutely examining the evidence frequently involving travel plans and timetables. Such granular examination contributed to the “humdrum” label.
The Inspector’s method is of “untiring thoroughness directed by flashes of inspiration which is the secret of his unfailing success.” Crofts’s writing skills lack the ability for solid character development. Apart from perhaps our instinctive empathy with the side of law and order in Golden Age fiction, modern readers will rarely feel any emotional connection to Crofts’s victims or villains. All too often it feels that his characters exist solely as devices to develop a particular alibi-related event. Moreover, his fictional work is generally devoid of humor, although his reference to fellow crime writer R. Austin Freeman in The 12.30 from Croydon and a reference to The Cask in his later novel The Sea Mystery (1928) would have made his loyal readership smile. Crofts is not alone in such limitations; Golden Age police procedurals can have a one-dimensional style. Perhaps this is part of their attraction. Readers are presented with a crime and can concentrate on observing the resolution of the case free of any distraction.
The maxim “write what you know” can be applied to much of Crofts’s output. Inspector French titles feature locations familiar to Crofts, including Cork in Fatal Venture (1939), Northern Ireland in Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, and Surrey in The Hogs Back Mystery and The Affair at Little Wokeham. As a railway engineer, Crofts deploys his interest in various methods of transportation to good effect. Yet, his familiarity with the workings of Scotland Yard was limited, as he confesses in Meet Inspector French (1935): “I knew nothing about the Yard or C.I.D. What was to be done? The answer was simple. I built upon the great rock which sustains so many of my profession: if I knew nothing of my subject, well, few of my readers would know any more.” Despite this casual attitude toward precise procedural detail, Crofts’s titles champion the role of law and order in society. His attempts to bring a sense of authenticity to depictions of the police force can be viewed as a rebuke to the fiction of E. W. Hornung’s Raffles and his fellow gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin. Crofts draws rather on antecedents like Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, who—middle-aged and friendly in appearance, but tenacious and perceptive—solves the murder that forms the climax of Bleak House (1853).
Meet Inspector French, for example, sees Crofts explain his decision to portray French as an uncomplicated character. This self-deprecating piece gives an insight into the origins of French’s personality and Crofts’s initial ambitions for the Inspector. French was always to be front and center as the main protagonist. From Shakespeare’s Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing to Arthur Conan Doyle’s depiction of Inspector Lestrade, literature is littered with examples of bumbling or boastful policemen. Crofts, however, was among the first in the established genre to develop a member of the police force as the central character. Equipped with the necessary crime-solving skill sets, matched with humble characteristics, French gained the admiration of his associates and that of generations of readers.
In his foreword to the eightieth anniversary edition of The Floating Admiral (2011), Simon Brett argues that “Berkeley is one of the contributors . . . whose name is still reasonably well known . . . the same can be said of Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, Freeman Wills Croft [sic] and Clemence Dane.” The misspelling of his name suggests that Crofts’s profile is less than prominent. Circulation figures for Crofts’s titles in the Library of Trinity College Dublin similarly suggest the author lacks popularity among the college community with just twenty-eight checkouts since the 1980s from the eighty-four volumes held in the library. Interestingly, however, the London Library’s copy of Mystery on Southampton Water has alone seen over one hundred loans over the same period, a figure that suggests at least pockets of popularity.
Despite his limitations as an author, Crofts was a ground-breaking precursor to what is now recognized as the distinct subgenre of the police procedural. His religious upbringing and lifelong devotion to the Church, while influencing his work—nowhere more so than in Antidote to Venom—failed to deter him from fictionalizing the most despicable of crimes. He deserves to be remembered more as an innovator than a great writer. Nevertheless, he had the ability to adapt his writing skills to various formats (monographs, short stories, radio plays) and styles (whodunits, inverted mysteries, multiple-narrator works, juvenile crime fiction, and round-robin works). Crofts’s influence is evident in the majority of police procedurals that followed, including Georges Simenon’s Maigret, crucially exemplifying how crime novels can allow the reader to follow the investigation step by step. For this his reputation deserves greater recognition.
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