Freeman Wills Crofts

• Born: June 1, 1879
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: April 11, 1957
• Place of death: Worthing, Sussex, England

Types of Plot: Police procedural; inverted; thriller

Principal Series: Inspector (later Superintendent) Joseph French, 1925-1957

Contribution

Freeman Wills Crofts’s twenty-eight novels featuring Inspector Joseph French are generally under the control of a third-person narrator, who allows the reader to share completely the actions and the thinking of the characters. Opting for the Wilkie Collins-Émile Gaboriau school of detective fiction as opposed to the C. Auguste Dupin-Sherlock Holmes super-sleuth school so popular before World War I, Crofts’s trademarks are meticulous planning by the criminal and the even more meticulous “alibi busting” by Inspector French. Crofts’s language is simple and straightforward, and his style is natural and unforced. He helped shape the subgenre that is known today as the psychological thriller.

The reader is informed from the outset of everything that French sees, does, and knows, and accompanies him step-by-step as French unravels the mystery. Some find Crofts’s method tedious, but fellow writers such as Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler have written warmly and admiringly of his craft. His appeal is to those who wish to be intellectually stimulated, not those seeking pure entertainment. His popularity in England and throughout Europe has been strong, but he has been less successful in the United States, where tastes run more toward the hard-boiled detective and urban violence. Crofts’s finely crafted plots seem to come naturally to a mind trained in mathematics and engineering.

Biography

Freeman Wills Crofts was born June 1, 1879, in Dublin, the son of a British army doctor who died during foreign service while his son was still a child. His widowed mother later married Archdeacon Harding of the Church of Ireland, and Crofts was reared in the Harding home. He attended Methodist and Campbell colleges in Belfast and, at seventeen, began his engineering studies under his uncle, Berkeley D. Wise, then chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. In 1899, Crofts was appointed junior assistant engineer for the construction of an extension of the Donegal Railway. In 1900, he was named district engineer at Coleraine for the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway and, ten years later, chief assistant engineer at Belfast for the same line. In 1912, he married Mary Bellas Canning, daughter of the manager of a local bank.

During a long illness and recovery in 1919, Crofts began to write to amuse himself. The result was The Cask, published in London by Collins in 1920, a novel generally hailed as a masterpiece of pure detection. He continued to publish almost yearly until 1929, when another serious illness forced him to choose between engineering and writing. He elected to continue writing; after he resigned his position with the railway, he and Mary moved near London, where he lived most of the rest of his life. In 1939, he was elected to the Royal Society of Arts. He died April 11, 1957, at the age of seventy-seven. Crofts’s other interests included gardening, carpentry, and music, as both an organist and a conductor. These interests are reflected by the characters in his novels. The personal traits most obvious in the novels, and especially in Inspector French, are those of a mind trained in mathematics and engineering methodically applying perseverance and logic to solving a problem or a murder.

Analysis

The horrors of World War I effectively put a stop to most entertaining writing in Europe. The super-sleuth antics of the Sherlock Holmes school lost much of their appeal as the last vestiges of the gaslight era of Victoria and Edward died in the technological advances demanded by war. A new breed of hero was in the making, led in part by John Buchan’s short novels for the boys in the trenches. Buchan’s novels featured a generally realistic Richard Hannay, who engaged in sophisticated battles of wit with his opponents.

The Cask

Freeman Wills Crofts’s first novel, The Cask, begun during his illness in 1919 and published in 1920, reflects the change then under way. The novel features the steady, systematic, and realistic police work that culminated in the creation of Inspector Joseph French in Crofts’s fifth novel. The influence ofÉmile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq—his painstaking reconstruction of the crime and the criminal’s movements through his analysis of footprints in the snow, scraps of material, the time necessary to move from one place to another—is apparent in Crofts’s early work. H. Douglas Thomson, in his Master of Mystery (1931), says of Lecoq, “Here is Inspector French’s prototype.”

Inspector French’s Greatest Case

Inspector French first appeared in the presumptuously titled Inspector French’s Greatest Case in 1925. Using bits and pieces from such diverse forerunners as Monsieur Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Monsieur Lecoq, and Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, Crofts created one of the most memorable characters in detective fiction. Like his predecessors, French carefully and methodically investigates everything, considers everything, notes everything, catalogs everything. Nothing escapes his attention and consideration. As French himself tells the reader, “The evidence is cumulative,” and the reconstruction of the crime, like the railway timetables with which Crofts was so familiar, falls neatly into place as each bit of information is slotted into its appropriate niche.

Crofts’s method of building a novel, police procedural or inverted, is relatively simple. Through the impersonal guidance of the unnamed, third-person narrator, the reader is kept informed of the action and of what is going on in the minds of both the criminal and the detective. The narrator lays out before the reader the actions and the thoughts of both. The excitement comes from the sustained attention to detail as the criminal attempts to cover his trail and as Inspector French re-creates the time-and-space sequence of the crime. French measures distances, times how quickly one can row a boat across a particular body of water, clocks how long it would take for a man the size of the suspect to climb out a window, cross a tract of land, scale a wall, and commit the crime. With Crofts, the nineteenth century Holmesian sleuth gives way to the sometimes plodding, always methodical, hardworking, routine investigator of the roman policier. Crofts’s influence on such detective-fiction writers as A. E. Fielding (Dorothy Fielding), Charles Barry, A. W. Marchmont, and J. S. Fletcher, among others, has been remarked by most historians of the genre. Peter Falk’s television investigator, Columbo, is directly descended from Inspector French.

Some critics consider as a flaw in Crofts’s work his dependence on the ability of French to remain the patient, kindly, thorough reader of clues and time passage. It is probably true that after twenty-eight novels, Crofts’s imagination had worn a little thin, partly as a result of his disinclination to create characters that go much beyond simulacra of types. His criminals are, however, finely drawn, within limits, and are usually well-placed individuals facing financial ruin or suffering from that ancient pair of human flaws, greed and lust. They turn to crime, usually murder, to alleviate their particular problem, plotting and scheming carefully to eliminate what each considers the potential of error. On the surface and to the average speculator, the crime is perfect because it is not obvious, but to Inspector Joseph French something simply does not quite fit, and he begins to test for flaws—and he finds them. His method is simple. He questions everybody and everything; he rereads his notes constantly, looking for what he must have overlooked earlier; and he times and measures and conjectures, and finally finds what he is looking for. The murderer then pays the ultimate penalty.

The 12:30 from Croydon

The 12:30 from Croydon (1934) is a fine example of Crofts’s inverted detective story and of Inspector French’s technique. Charles Swinburn owns a motor manufacturing plant that is in financial trouble, as a result of both the conditions of the time and antiquated machinery. His uncle, Andrew Crowther, who began the plant and made it into a successful business, is retired and in ill health. Crowther sees Swinburn’s difficulties as the result of laziness and a refusal to work hard and reminds him of this attitude whenever they meet. Peter Morley, Crowther’s son-in-law, is also experiencing difficulties with his business, farming, and Crowther’s attitude toward him is much the same. The novel opens with the death of Crowther on a flight to Paris, a death the authorities in Paris do not consider to be of natural causes. The autopsy shows potassium cyanide sufficient to cause death, and the police are notified.

Crofts then takes the reader back in time and outlines the series of events that led to Swinburn’s decision to murder his uncle, after Crowther refused to lend him more than a thousand pounds to save the business. Swinburn needs five thousand, at least, to buy new machinery to make the business competitive. Swinburn considers introducing a poisoned pill into Crowther’s bottle of Salter’s Anti-Indigestion Pills, knowing that eventually Crowther will take that pill and die. Swinburn is aware that he and Elsie, Crowther’s daughter and Morley’s wife, are the principal beneficiaries to Crowther’s estate, and he decides to put his plan into action.

Swinburn also contemplates a future without Una Mellor, the somewhat indifferent lady with whom he is in love—a future that would certainly end should he go bankrupt. Swinburn then takes the valuable paintings his father left him and pawns them in London, acquiring enough cash to get the needed machinery. Using another’s name, he purchases an ounce of potassium cyanide on the pretense of wanting to destroy a wasps’ nest and buys a bottle of Salter’s Anti-Indigestion Pills and experiments until he is able to fill a pill with the poison and put it back together so that it looks like the other pills. At another dinner engagement with his uncle, as Crowther is preparing to take his usual pill, Swinburn “accidentally” spills a glass of wine and in the confusion slips the deadly pill in among the others. He then takes a cruise to provide an alibi. Later, on a plane trip, Crowther takes the pill and dies.

John Weatherup, Crowther’s valet and companion, casually reminds Swinburn of the wine spilling and notes that he had observed the exchange of pills. He mentions money and tells Swinburn that he has written down what he has seen, giving the information in a sealed envelope to Peter Morley, to be opened should something happen to him. It is blackmail, but more urgently it is a direct threat to Swinburn’s life, his hopes for the success of the plant, and for a future with Una Mellor. He begins to plan another murder, and the reader accompanies him as he lures Weatherup to the boathouse, kills him, weighs him down and drops him into the lake, and then reenters the house to look for the letter. Although things now appear to be looking up for Swinburn, Inspector French is making visits and asking questions of everyone associated with Swinburn and with Crowther’s household. A final visit by French is to Swinburn, which results in the arrest of Swinburn for the murders of Andrew Crowther and John Weatherup.

The trial of Swinburn is short. The prosecution and the defense arguments are given, and evidence of which Swinburn cannot imagine the source is introduced. The scene is calmly and straightforwardly played, while Swinburn mentally and silently feels the horror of what is to happen. He is convicted, his appeal is dismissed, and he is hanged. A few weeks later, Inspector French and the defense attorney team meet for dinner, and French carefully outlines the means by which he trapped and convicted Swinburn. The reader learns how he located the chemist who sold Swinburn the poison, how he traced the lead pipe used to weigh down the body of Weatherup to a plumber who had done work for Swinburn, how he matched up the sawed ends of the pipe to Swinburn’s saw, how he came to realize that the key that had been returned to Morley’s study on the night of Weatherup’s death could have been returned only by someone who knew the house, and how the evidence accumulated to the point that every indicator pointed to Swinburn. It was then that French arrested Swinburn and gave the evidence he had gathered to the prosecution.

Mystery on Southampton Water

A similar story, but with a more surprising ending, is Mystery on Southampton Water. A rivalry between two concrete manufacturers, Brand and King, leads to the accidental death of a nightwatchman. Brand and King fake an auto accident to conceal the death, but Inspector French discovers that the carburetor was smashed so that the car would burn. He also finds the stone used to smash the carburetor. Later, the officials at Chayle, the rival manufacturer, come to Brand, King, and their boss James Tasker with a proposal to franchise them with the new concrete formula in return for 75 percent of their profits. King, on the night the watchman died, had stolen the formula and some cash, which he had placed in the car with the murdered man. The Chayle people do not know this, but King decides to eliminate potential problems by rigging with a bomb the motor boat in which the three executives are traveling. It explodes, but Noel Samson, Chayle’s chief engineer, survives. French reenters the scene and analyzes the watchman’s death, the faked automobile accident, the boat accident, and the two companies. He has the remains of the boat raised by divers and discovers how the bomb was triggered. He times the trip and concludes that if the three men had not made a detour to visit a sister of one of the men, the craft would have exploded at such a point that no recovery would have been possible and no survival probable.

French has an “inspiration” and times how long it would take for two men to leave King’s laboratory, row across the water, climb the wall of Chayle’s plant, kill the watchman, burglarize the office, take the body away, and stage the accident. He finds a gramophone and a recording that consists of a dialogue between King and Tasker (Tasker had to memorize his lines) to suggest that King was in his office, when in fact he was rigging the boat for destruction. French times this adventure as well, and finds that it corresponds with the length of the recording. A different dimension of French is now made clear to readers of this book: his ability to interpret people for who they are and for what they may be hiding. The surprise occurs when Tasker is revealed as the mastermind behind King’s actions. Brand is the innocent dupe. Tasker and King are convicted, and Brand leaves for other environments. French returns to London and his wife, home, and garden.

Crofts was an innovator, a good storyteller, and a first-rate craftsman in his chosen literary field. Although most of his Inspector French novels were published in the United States, many of those under the Dodd-Mead Red Badge Books imprint, he was never as much of a force for American readers as he was for British and Continental readers. His books enjoyed steady if not spectacular sales and were translated into nearly all the European languages. Crofts played a significant part in the development of the psychological thriller. His body of work includes splendid examples of the police procedural and inverted subgenres. Finally, Crofts introduced his readers to Inspector (later Superintendent) Joseph French, a very fine literary invention indeed.

Principal Series Character:

• Inspector Joseph French of Scotland Yard, is comfortably middle-aged, stoutish, slightly below average height, clean-shaven, with alert but kindly blue eyes, happily married, an amateur gardener, a dapper dresser, and polite. French ages little in the series and resents cases that prevent his spending weekends at home. He believes in “reconstructing his cases from the point of view of time” (Mystery on Southampton Water, 1934), and he says about his promotions, a “rise in position means a corresponding increase in loneliness.”

Bibliography

Craig, Patricia, and Mary Cadogan. Introduction to Inspector French’s Greatest Case, by Freeman Wills Crofts. London: Hogarth, 1985. Survey of Crofts’s career and the character of Inspector French, occasioned by the re-issue of the inspector’s first adventure.

Haycraft, Howard, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Reprint. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1983. Massive compendium of essays exploring all aspects of the mystery writer’s craft. Provides context for understanding Crofts.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Makes only minimal reference to Crofts, but helps readers establish Crofts’s place among the writers of classic mysteries.

Routley, Erik. The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph. London: Gollancz, 1972. Idiosyncratic but useful discussion of crime fiction in terms of nominally puritanical ideology. Sheds light on Crofts’s work.

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. Rev. ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. Discusses Croft’s contribution to the development of the psychological thriller genre.