Having previously had a new business undertaking result in murder in Fatal Venture (1939), and having dealt in business manipulation in The End of Andrew Harrison (1938), Freeman Wills Crofts once again mixes his earlier experiences to bring us something similar to before but deliberately different enough to matter with James Tarrant, Adventurer, a.k.a. Circumstantial Evidence (1941). And so we have our eponymous chemist setting out “adventuring himself on a flowing tide, and instead [finding] himself floating in circles in a backwater,” and coming up with a canny idea to ride on the tails of a successful patent medicine brand. What could possibly go wrong?

With Tarrant’s unscrupulous nature not in doubt — the ‘Adventurer’ in the title is in the ‘Bounder’ vein — there’s undoubtedly the feeling here that the Braxamin indigestion cure people, on whose bandwagon he leaps, have something coming to them: one member of the firm’s board achieving the position of “Deputy Chairman, not because of his business ability, a trait of which no one had ever accused him” and the fact that another “was retiring in a few months render[ing] any opinion which, unexpectedly, he might express, of even less importance than it might otherwise have been”. And the company’s inherent shadiness can be seen in the fact that Braxamin will be reluctant to take Tarrant to court, he avows, because they don’t want their sharp practice of overpricing basic medicines — “the [cost] is part of the cure…” — brought to public awareness.

At just before the halfway point, murder results, and with no fewer than four people given good cause to wish the victim out of the way, it falls to Chief Inspector Joseph French to untangle the deceptively simple skein of the death. We see here again French’s doggedness, his intelligence in putting together disparate pieces of evidence, and the heavy toll that moving against someone takes on him

Though French always tried to keep his sympathies separate from his business, he could not but feel intensely sorry for [her]. Apart from the craving for sympathy shown by this laying bare of her feelings to a complete stranger and a police officer at that, her disillusionment…would be inevitable. Only if he failed to find the murderer could it remain secret, and to contemplate such a contingency was beyond French’s powers.

The three clear sections of this story — preamble, investigation, trial — recall the similarly-partitioned structure of Found Floating (1937), but Crofts improves on that by sliding more organically between parts, telling chunks of chapters from a certain point of view (French is in this perhaps less than any other book to thus far feature him). It’s difficult, reading this in the context of Crofts’ other work, not to feel like he’s deliberately moving in the direction of the crime novel here, essaying more of a realistic streak in that final section which makes the variant title perhaps the better. And it’s difficult to talk about without spoiling things, but, as a Crofts aficionado, I promise that this reads better when you have the context of at least a few earlier French novels to go on.

The trial sections are told from the perspective of the judge, Mr Anthony Frobisher, and contain some of the sort of excellent character work that naysayers would have you Crofts in incapable of achieving…

[H]e had never become reconciled to seeing persons on trial for their life, and that hideous business of pronouncing sentence remained for him a ghastly nightmare. Today he feared the case would prove particularly harrowing. … [I]t would not be one of those cases in which a hardened criminal pits himself against society in a gambler’s throw for wealth or security, but rather one in which weak though well-meaning human nature is overwhelmed by the force of cruel circumstances. Unhappily, cruel circumstances could make no difference to the tragic end of such a trial, should the verdict be adverse.

…with some keen observations on the stagey nature of criminal trials (“Frobisher…knew that with the average uncritical mind, facts were of minor importance. It was their presentation that really mattered.”) that veers close to commentary. This is the first time Crofts has taken us inside the courtroom, and it pays off his decision to tell this from those multiple points of view very intelligently: tackling a facet of writing which is new to the author but doubtless all-too-familiar to reader and character alike.

By invoking Friday 17th March and “the Thompson-Bywaters case of nearly twenty years earlier”, Crofts seems to have set this narrative pre-WW2 in 1939. While the exigency of fiction might well be to provide relief in trying times, it’s fascinating to think of the decision made to ignore the ongoing conflict that had the whole world so wrapped in its thrall…all the more reason I consider this deliberate and rate this highly. Twenty-five books into his career, Freeman Wills Crofts retains a keenness of insight and a clarity of purpose, resulting in one of the most compelling exercises he’s yet undertaken. It pays to remember the effort that must have gone into maintaining such high quality output — surely we’ve all got bored with our jobs at some point, and novelists are no doubt no different. To write this well after so long is something to be highly commended, and I maintain my unflagging eagerness for Crofts’ remaining oeuvre going forward.

~