Your typical Freeman Wills Crofts protagonist — fallen on hard times, usually following the death of a loved one — young widow Julia Langley enters into a marriage of convenience with solicitor Richard Elton. He will provide for her daughter Mollie, and she will run his house, Chalfont, as hostess for social events that singularly fail to win his unprepossessing personality the acceptance he so craves. And so, Julia falls in love with wealthy novelist Frank Cox, throwing a wrench into the works of her agreeable if not desirable arrangement, and before long someone in the Elton ménage is found murdered and the various secrets in the household start to creep out.

Initially put out, because he had been very much looking forward to his weekend erection (of a greenhouse), Chief Inspector Joseph French is quick to recognise that there is something unusual about the behaviour of almost everyone in the household. Stories don’t quite add up, people appear uncomfortable when certain topics are breached — honestly, French would have a far harder time in this book if anyone could conceal any of their thoughts — and, before too long, he cuts through most of the dissembling…yet still finds himself with an intractable problem and a very real corpse that must have ended up in the condition through someone’s intervention. The problem is, whose?

Fear Comes to Chalfont (1942) is the twenty-third novel to feature French, and you can feel Crofts sometimes stuttering in how to ring the changes here as he has done in almost every book he’s written. The first third is, I’m afraid, pretty turgid, told mostly from Julia Langley’s perspective as we get to know the household, encounter the crime, and are left with many suspicions rich and o’erflowing in our mind. Crofts has done good work in this vein prior to now — Sudden Death (1932), Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), The End of Andrew Harrison (1938) — but the Langley Group are as dull a household as you’ll encounter, and the central plight insufficient to prop up such a large chunk of narrative.

It improves when French is finally brought in, lumbered with new Hendon recruit Sergeant Rollo, who is sent along by Sir Mortimer Ellison to see if he is worthy of promotion to Inspector. Much as French laments the absence of his usual foil Sergeant Carter, I preferred Rollo, who at least features in the narrative and is able to put forward some intelligent suggestions. I enjoyed the back-and-forth of the pair, not really a feature of these books since the inexplicable vanishing of Sergeant Ormsby, and it’s fun to see a little more of French’s personality deliberately brought out in the way he lightly goads and encourages the younger man on to better things.

As an example of French’s “ordinary humdrum and uninspired methods” — basically, consider everything, no matter how small — this shows Crofts off well, but the single murder within doesn’t quite justify the length of the narrative and some of the reasoning used to extend things (the closing paragraphs of chapter 11, say) lack Crofts’ usually excellent clarity. The speed with which French gets to the heart of the lies is impressive, but then the final revelation which captures our killer is pretty limp and hard to get too interested in, even if some of the writing along the way — French extracting information from a suspect “like dragging a bone from a snarling dog” — is among Crofts’ best to date:

Fear in fact had taken possession of [Chalfont]. Fear was present everywhere. It stalked the corridors and lurked in the corners of the rooms…[F]ear for their lives, or for the life of a dear one; fear of arrest and of what would follow arrest. Fear that each day might be the last on which they would live as normal individuals.

Given the wartime publication of this, it’s interesting to see Crofts acknowledge the edges of that conflict — the blackout, Julia’s daughter Mollie being “called up”, etc. — while reassuring readers early on that “[t]his is not an account of the war, nor will any unnecessary reference be made to it”. Fun, too, to see the Croftsiverse continue to reference itself, with Shaw, the investigator from Golden Ashes (1940), making an appearance and enjoying another patch of raillery with French. I also sincerely hope this isn’t the last we see of Rollo, because I was never that much of a fan of Carter — I didn’t dislike him, there was just nothing to him except a uniform and his occasional, often only implied, presence.

Fear Comes to Chalfont represents, then, the thinner end of Crofts’ more successful undertakings. It would currently sit at the bottom of his second-tier work for me, lacking any really brilliant ideas and highlighting how secondary character work — Julia, Frank Cox, Jeffrey Langley, the chemist guy whose name I can’t remember — isn’t always a well-stocked part of his armoury. Some good ideas swirl here, and the methods of French are always pleasing to my ordered mind, but the occasional lack of clarity, the slowness with which this lumbers to a start, and the tepid nature of the revelation which reveals our killer all pull it down a star in my estimations. Start elsewhere, and come back to this when you’re convinced of Crofts’ class.

~