People will tell you that I lack critical faculties when it comes to the work of Freeman Wills Crofts, and, well, they might have a point: I find his flavour of rigorous investigation and patient construction exactly to my liking, and will start anything by him in the most positive frame of mind. But, well, even my optimism was dented by A Losing Game, a.k.a. The Losing Game (1941), which feels, for perhaps the first time, like a man trying to fulfil a deadline — not least because it’s poorly-constructed and, and in a late attempt to swing suspicion elsewhere, requires the reader to ignore one of the key tenets of the crime under investigation. This is not the Freeman Wills Crofts I have come to know and love.

It’s difficult not to feel like the structure is off here, because the first half of the book is spent introducing us to a blackmailer and various of his victims, before one of said targets — detective novelist Tony Meadowes — falls under suspicion of murder. We know Tony didn’t do it, but a lazy case of circumstantial evidence (clearly a preoccupation of Crofts’ at this time, as it was also the focus of his previous novel) is raised against him, and his fiancée approaches Inspector Joseph French to see if something might be done.

For all Crofts’ skill with minor character beats — a butler who “attained the right to appoint and discharge staff [and so] became a little god in the establishment”, or Mrs. Farson who “talked vivaciously about everything and [whose husband] nearly always looked bored” — he isn’t great with passion or deep feeling, and his expression of and around such matters is so buttoned-up that I couldn’t help but picture everyone in 18th century dress. The book doesn’t really relax until French comes into it halfway through, and this time could have been spent watching our dogged detective work his way among these various people and their stories as he put together the case. As it is, the first half is, well, not boring, but it feels like time badly spent.

Secondly, events are weirdly compressed: the body is discovered in a burning house, the fire starting between 3 and 4 a.m. Yet by the middle of that day — eight or nine hours after the fire started — they’ve already held and adjourned an inquest on the corpse. That…feels fast. Equally, Tony’s sister Cecily is in a repertory company who, we’re told at the start, will be putting on a play later that week, yet six days later she’s already involved in rehearsals for another play with the same company…? It makes no difference to the plot at all, it’s just weird that all these events seem to be collapsed together in such a rush, and weirder still because they make no difference to the plot.

It’s as French’s typically meticulous investigation gathers pace — “[He] felt that he might unhesitatingly accept the statements. They were confirmed by no less than five considerations…” — that things start to feel normal, but even then questions remain. The illegal search at the bank, for one thing — how is French going to explain this being the genesis of his eventually fruitful investigations? We’re told he can’t, and then…well, he must, I guess, but it’s never covered, which feels very unlike Crofts. Some of the detection is very good, but events in the closing stages are oddly compressed again, when time could have been spent exploring these discoveries, as we would expect from this author.

Don’t get me wrong, as an eager devourer of some 26 previous novels by Crofts I found this very easy to read, and it passed the time pleasantly, but there are more gripes in this book alone than in the entirety of his oeuvre to this point. There was, though, some fun to be had: Meadowes’s speciality “was in ingenious methods of murder” and mention is made of “some kind of club in Town” made up of fellow writers who go for dinners together…clearly a simulacrum of The Detection Club. And, wouldn’t you know it, one of the club’s members “was unbeatable at the very same kind of problems” and so might, Cecily thinks, be a good man to approach for help. His name? Ian Lane, and if that’s not a John Rhode pun then I’ll eat your hat.

That late stirring of the embers — undertaken to perhaps try the springing of a terminal surprise, rarely a strong point of Crofts’ — in which not just the reader but the famously painstaking French must ignore one of the biggest aspects of the murder, wrote this off for me, I’m afraid. Crofts clearly believes in the machinery of the law (“English justice is far from perfect, but it’s as good, if not better, than any other in the world.”) but his attempts to explore that are, this time, badly off the boil. Of course, everyone writes a duff book now and again (hell, some authors make a career out of it…) so we’ll chalk this up to experience and move on quickly.

Lots and lots and lots of typos in this 2022 Harper Collins edition, too. “The deceased seemed to have been in good health, and apart from the bums, there was no obvious injury to the remains.” — the mind boggles.

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