I really rather enjoyed Faith Martin’s impossible crime novel The Castle Mystery (2019) when I read it back in 2019, so stumbling over a new hardback by her at my local library — and learning that Murder by Candlelight (2024) features a murdered body discovered in a sealed room — was a very pleasant surprise.
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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.
I’ve been struggling to enjoy my reading of late, so it was something of a relief to revisit The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie and find it so enjoyable. We’re probably in the lower half of Christie’s second-tier work here, but for a relatively early book it shows a lot of promise, goes about its simple story well, and doesn’t try to get too clever in doing what it does. Yes, she would go on to write much, much better works in the decade that followed, but taken on its own terms this is a good little mystery which gives a sense of how far the young Agatha had come in her career, and hints at the maven she would soon be recognised as.
Bodies from the Library 6 (2023) represents another delightful foray into the neglected and forgotten stories from many of the luminaries of the Golden Age, as editor Tony Medawar puts his enviable genre awareness to wonderful use bringing yet more gems to public attention.
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Fatal Venture (1939) represents, by my count, the ninth time in twenty-three books that Freeman Wills Crofts has devised a criminal scheme which contains a significant strain of maritime malfeasance. Compared to the mere brace involving railway timetables, you have to wonder why he’s seen as the Timbletable King rather than the Wizard of the Waterways — hell, even these excellent Harper Collins reissues make a point of highlighting his use of railway timetables, so you have to wonder if that myth will ever die. Never mind, this is still superb; highlighting why Crofts has fallen by the wayside compared to some of his peers, perhaps, but enjoyable, clever, and surprising along with it.
I had intended to review Behind the Crimson Blind (1952) by Carter Dickson this week, but the opening chapters of that puzzled my will and so I’ve taken the coward’s way out and opted to reread what I remembered as a stone-cold classic: village poison pen tale The Moving Finger (1942) by Agatha Christie. My recollection was that this both made the threat of nasty letters actually seem like something to fear and provided a superb reveal of its guilty party through one of the best pieces of negative evidence in the genre…and, in these regards, it stood up. It also fell down in a couple of others, but we’ll get to that. Headline: this is a great example of what the Golden Age did so well, and comes highly recommended.
It’s been a long road to The End of Andrew Harrison, a.k.a. The Futile Alibi (1938) by Freeman Wills Crofts. Back when I was fairly new to classic era detective fiction in general, and impossible crimes in particular, I heard rumours of this book — the first I’d ever heard of Crofts — but it turned out to be rather unavailable. I also heard that Crofts was dull, dull, dull, however, and so spent a long time avoiding him before finally taking the plunge, falling in love with his writing and reading 22 of his novels in broad chronology, in which time Andrew Harrison was reprinted by Harper Collins. And…that just about brings us up to date.
The annual Bodies from the Library (2018-present) collections, in which Tony Medawar expertly selects long-forgotten and previously-unpublished stories and plays, have become essential purchases for anyone with even a passing interest in the great and the good of detective fiction’s Golden Age.
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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.
With the sixteenth to twenty-fourth novels by Freeman Wills Crofts to feature his series detective Chief Inspector Joseph French due to be republished between now and January 2023 (well, #18, Antidote to Venom (1938), is already available from the British Library) it occurred to me that people might be looking for advice about the first fifteen — all, incredibly, in print.
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The Invisible Event 