Freeman Wills Crofts
#688: Sudden Death (1932) by Freeman Wills Crofts
Today, three previously very hard to find novels by Freeman Wills Crofts are republished by HarperCollins: Death on the Way (1932), The Loss of the ‘Jane Vosper’ (1936), and Man Overboard! (1936). September will add Mystery on Southampton Water (1934), Crime at Guildford (1935), and Sudden Death (1932) to that, bringing the total of Crofts’ works in ready circulation up to twenty. I have no idea why they’re being published out of order, and frankly I don’t really care — it’s mainly just delightful to see him getting some traction — and I wanted to celebrate by continuing my broadly chronological reading of Crofts with this, the first of his which ever came to my attention.
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In GAD We Trust – Episode 2: Inverted Mysteries [w’ Aidan @ Mysteries Ahoy!]
Another week in lockdown, another episode of my new “hopefully this will distract you” Golden Age Detection podcast, In GAD We Trust.
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#655: Mystery in the Channel, a.k.a. Mystery in the English Channel (1931) by Freeman Wills Crofts
Since the British Library’s reissues of The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933) and Antidote to Venom (1938) are what got me reading Freeman Wills Crofts in the first place, it was with some excitement that I, now a fully signed-up Croftian reading his work chronologically, approached another of his titles selected for the BL’s Crime Classics range. Possibly on account of a certain perturbation at current world events, I’ve been really struggling of late to persevere with books I’ve not been enjoying, so I suspect that a dive into some comfort reading is what’s needed. And Crofts fits that bill like a glove…if you’ll forgive my, er, mixing of metaphors.
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#647: Spoiler Warning 13 – The Box Office Murders, a.k.a. The Purple Sickle Murders (1929) by Freeman Wills Crofts
#591: Spoiler Warning – Coming in January: The Box Office Murders, a.k.a. The Purple Sickle Murders (1929) by Freeman Wills Crofts
Brad and I are done dissecting Agatha Christie’s final work Postern of Fate (1973), so it’s time to make spoiler-filled plans for another piece of detective fiction and, well, can you guess which one it will be…?
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#584: Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy (1927) by Freeman Wills Crofts
As his seventh published novel, Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy (1927) shows Freeman Wills Crofts again subtly altering his approach to take us through the minutiae of crime and detection, introducing a structural change which addresses the issue of “whodunnit” that these early GAD trendsetters sometimes struggled with. While you may well be aware of the guilty party from about chapter 4, rest assured that Inspector Joseph French eventually cottons onto his target at around the halfway stage, and the final third of the book is then devoted to tracing the criminal. And a lot of fun is to be had along the way.
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#561: Thinking Too Precisely on th’ Event – Clued and Unclued Detective Fiction, or: The Active and the Passive Detective-Reader
August is my summer holiday, and I’m contributing to the slow death of the planet by taking a few breaks here and there, so might not be as hot in the comments as usual. But the nature of what we mean when we say “GAD” has been on my mind for a while, so here goes nothing.
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#560: Inspector French’s Greatest Case (1924) by Freeman Wills Crofts
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. After a debut that laid the cornerstone of a new genre and three succeeding works exploring the principles of that genre from varying perspectives, now begins Freeman Wills Crofts’ 30-novel (plus however-many short stories) relationship with Inspector Joseph French. At this stage it’s difficult to judge how French differs from his antecedents Burnley, Lafarge, Tanner, Willis, Vandam, and Ross, but I guess we’ll never know whether French was ever initially conceived as more than a one-book man like those others. The title certainly suggests so, but history shows otherwise.
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#546: The 10 Types of Impossible Crime – Categories and Titles from Our Talk at Bodies from the Library 2019
