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.

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.

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?

Rendered a widow and penniless at a young age — well, she is a Freeman Wills Crofts protagonist — Betty Stanton is fortunate in finding a job as housekeeper and general organiser of newly-minted baronet Sir Geoffrey Buller. Betty is delighted both with the setting of Forde Manor and the enviable collection of art on display — art that is of particular interest to her friend, the famous authority Charles Barke. Before long, however, tragedy strikes — again, this is a Freeman Wills Crofts novel — and Forde Manor burns down, resulting in the loss of both the priceless artefacts within and Betty’s position. And when Charles Barke disappears soon thereafter, a certain DCI French begins to suspect that the events might be linked.