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.

In the same year that Agatha Christie mixed sight-seeing and shipboard slaughter in Death on the Nile (1937), Freeman Wills Crofts sent his series detective, Chief Inspector Joseph French, into bat with a similarly travelogue-rich tale of marine-centric malfeasance. Found Floating (1937) might, in many ways, be seen as Crofts’ take on the essential principles of a Christie plot, even if it does highlight many of the reasons Dame Agatha has remained in the public consciousness while Crofts is only now enjoying a resurgence in awareness and popularity. Indeed, for a man who made hay in the annals of the realistic detective story, this might be his most successful brush with verisimilitude yet.