4/9/17

Dead in the Water

"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."
- Andrew Lippincott (Agatha Christie's Endless Night, 1967)
Back in 2015, I finally got around to reading a couple of Freeman Wills Crofts' detective novels, The Cask (1920) and The Sea Mystery (1928), which were excellent and showed the hand of an intelligent, technically-minded and no-nonsense writer – who has been unfairly labeled as a humdrum. I wanted to continue exploring his work, but got distracted by the deluge of reprints mentioned in my previous blog-post.

Luckily, Crofts is one of the authors currently being reissued en masse. Several of his earlier books appear to be in the public domain (e.g. The Pit-Prop Syndicate, 1922), but the British Library and Collins Crime Club have both reprinted a number of titles from the late 1920-and 30s. So far, they've brought back such interesting titles as Sir John Magill's Last Journey (1930) and The Hog's Back Mystery (1933), but there was another title that caught my attention.

Mystery in the Channel (1931), or Mystery in the English Channel, is the seventh book about Crofts plain, but highly competent, policeman-character, Inspector Joseph French. What attracted my attention was its tantalizing premise.

A cross-channel steamer of the Southern Railway Company, Chichester, passed the halfway mark on their journey through the English Channel when they came across a motionless yacht. The name of the vessel is the Nymph and as they come nearer to the boat they see a man "lying in a heap on the deck." Upon closer inspection, the crew members of the steamer discover that there are two dead men aboard the pleasure yacht, shot through the head, but are unable to locate a gun – eliminating the possibility of a murder-suicide. So one of the crew members is tasked with sailing the "rich man's toy" back to England and handing the floating crime-scene over to the authorities.

The victim's are quickly identified as Paul A. Moxon and Sydney Deeping, the chairman and vice-chairman of Moxon's General Securities, which finds itself at the center of a financial disaster when they become unable to meet its liabilities. The total deficit is believed to approach eight million pounds, left thousands ruined and according to the newspapers "the tale of disaster is not yet complete." And they weren't wrong.

Bryce Raymond and Joshua Esdale, a third partner and chief accountant, are nowhere to be found, but they're not the only ones who are unaccounted for: a large sum of cash money, "a million and a half sterling," have disappeared from the company's strong-room – which makes for a pretty bundle of trouble.

Inspector French goes about his task with dogged determination and shrewdly reconstructed what roughly happened aboard based on blood-stains and a pool of blood. Equally impressive is chapter nine, titled "Distance Over Time Equals Speed," in which French reconstructs the movements of the various vessels involved and tries "to fix the point of the murders." Something he calls Point M. By the way, I think that would have been a better title for the book than the more mundane and less imaginative Mystery in the Channel.

Anyway, the investigation is not a solo performance on French's part and his success depends on the large, sprawling police apparatus of two countries.

As an overseas colleague said to French, "this is no longer a job for one man," but "a case for the organization" that could field hundreds, or even thousands, of men to follow up on every single lead. Crofts eagerly gives his readers a glimpse of the machination of these organizations and assigns various policemen to such background tasks as following "a trail of numbered banknotes" or trying to locate one of the missing men, which is painstaking work stretched out over several weeks – one throw-away remark revealed the case had been dragging on for six weeks.

So you can say that this series, particularly this title, is an early predecessor of the modern police procedural, but the plots are unquestionably a product of their time (i.e. pure Golden Age). The devilish clever and twisted plot here was unraveled by slow, determined police work, but carries all the hallmarks of a vintage detective novel and a notable aspect of this was the pool of blood aboard the yacht. French's first conclusion proved to be not entirely correct and emerging evidence showed there was a second explanation for what, initially, seemed fairly straightforward. Just what you'd expect from a classic mystery novel from the early 1930s!

I also loved the fiendishly clever, slightly technical, but ultimately simple, alibi-trick of the murderer. Or how the explanation has answers to the questions I began to ask myself while reading the book. Like why didn't the murderer threw the bodies overboard and scuttled the yacht? It would have made it all but impossible for the police to solve the case, but the solution provided a satisfying answer for these question.

I should also point out that Mystery in the Channel, like so many mysteries from the 1930s, was rife with condemnation for the figureheads in the financial calamities that left thousands of people "irretrievable ruined." On several occasions, Crofts gives brief details how people were ruined (e.g. "elderly men, having to start life again. And heaven knows where they'll get jobs."). Such characters as bankers, stockbrokers and financiers were not the most popular characters in the detective-fiction of the post-1929 world.

Apparently, Crofts loved ships and was personally very interested in the inner-workings of large business enterprises, which both come to the foreground in Mystery in the Channel and he erected a first-rate plot around these two pet subjects – in which every piece of evidence and event fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. Crofts may not have been a writer with too many literary pretensions, but he was a plotter of the first water and I should make an excursion to his work more often.

On a final note, I sure hope Sudden Death (1932) and The End of Andrew Harrison (1938) are considered for reprinting in the hopefully not so distant future. So, if any of you publishing people are reading this, you might want to scribble those two titles down.

16 comments:

  1. I ended up with a few Crofts books following The Hog's Back Mystery and have yet to actually read any of them: I don't have this, but I have the other BL reprints and Sir John Magill's Last Journey which someone recommended as a top tier Crofts.

    When you say "The devilish clever and twisted plot here was unraveled by slow, determined police work, but carries all the hallmarks of a vintage detective novel", that's exactly what I'm hoping to hear about Crofts and his work. The fascination in detail is something that can possibly be overwhelming -- in a different mood, Hog's Back would have been far too much for me -- but his commitment to every aspect of the minutiae is actually kind of staggering when you look at the number of books and the number of years he sustained it over.

    But, well, in order to say that with an athority I need to actually read some more of him. So it looks like I have a date with FWC in my near future...

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    1. Your comment came through instead of vanishing into the void! Yay!

      You're right that Crofts can be overwhelming when he gives full attention to every small detail of his plots or begins to sound like your algebra teacher, but loved that he assumed his readers are intelligent people who can handle a time-table. So you know you're getting a plot-driven detective story when cracking open one of his books. And that's always reassuring.

      A reading tip: Collins Crime Club has reissued The Sea Mystery. I loved that one and D, from Vintage Pop Fiction, called it a favorite of his. You might want to toss that one on your pile as well.

      My next Crofts will be a toss up between The Hog's Back Mystery and Antidote to Venom.

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    2. Emboldened by my commenting success, here I go again: I'm tempted to make AtV my next Crofts, though I've just discovered that I own an impossible crime that doesn't appear to hav a proper review online anywhere, so I might make that my next review.

      But Crofts after that. And then I'll get The Sea Mystery. And hopefully Andrew Harrison and Sudden Death will be reissued in due course...

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    3. Well, it seems one part of the posting problem has come to an end. Most blogs still queue my comments, until they're approved, but at least they get posted. Eventually. Strangely enough, I can post comments without a problem on Ho-Ling's blog. Anyhow...

      You aroused my curiosity about that impossible crime novel. Care to share the author/title with us? Because, you know, I'm a locked room addict. A very curious one.

      I suppose I'll settle for The Hog's Back Mystery as my next Crofts, but there are also two old, battered paperback editions of The Groote Park Murder and Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy buried, somewhere, in my TBR-pile. So I might excavate them as well.

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    4. The impossible crime is Murder in Black and White, by Milward Kenedy writing as Evelyn Elder. I'm not entirely sure I knew it was an impossibility when I bought it, I just remember hearing about its slightly unusual structure.

      However, more news if/as/when I read it...

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    5. You picked a really obscure one! I'll be awaiting your review to see whether it will end up on my wish list or not.

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  2. Once upon a time my then husband and I indulged in reading any Freeman Wills Croft we could find. I loved them then and love them now. But oh, are they hard to find. I have the audible version of THE HOG'S BACK MYSTERY which I enjoyed very much. I've been meaning to get my hands on more Croft books. Your review makes me think I'm going to be looking for MURDER IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL asap.

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    1. Rejoice, Yvette. The era when Crofts' detective novels were scarce and hard to come by are ending! As I said above, several publishers are in the process of reprinting his work. You'll sure love Mystery in the Channel, if you liked any of his other books.

      Just noticed Collins Crime Club reprinted The Box Office Murders last month. I had not noticed that before, but believe that was also one of his scarcer, or lesser-known, titles. So, once again, rejoice!

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  3. I've only read Hog's Back, and have quite a few other Crofts titles sitting on my literal and metaphorical TBR pile. Glad that this one is a good one - as I own it. :)

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    1. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have, Jonathan.

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  4. It seems to me that Crofts did not write predecessors to the police procedural, but rather wrote the real thing; in fact is one of its inventors, along with Henry Wade and some others. For instance, Crofts understands very well that the police act as an organization, rather than as single investigators. The fact that it is in Golden Age style is a plus. The police procedurals we see nowadays strike me as being a lazy way to write mysteries; all too often the detective just walks around talking to people until he stumbles over the solution. About the only modern procedurals I enjoy reading are those by Michael Connelly.

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    1. Oh, there's no doubt that Crofts wrote better (and more accurate) police procedurals than most of today's crime writers.

      Granted, I've not looked extensively into the modern police procedural, but my impression is that only a handful of writers, such as Ed McBain and M.P.O. Books, had policemen, rather than a policeman, as their protagonist.

      Basil Thomson is another (early) example of someone who did the police procedural right.

      I never heard of Michael Connelly, but did he wrote something a hopeless classicist, like me, would enjoy?

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  5. Michael Connelly writes the Harry Bosch mysteries. Recently they were made into a TV series. The early books are better than the later ones when, as usual, he started to get very political. I thought that his book Angels Flight (1999) was such a superb procedural as to be well worth reading even though highly political. It gives off a real sense of apocalyptic dread.

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    1. Honestly, I'm not really enticed to put Connelly on my wish list.

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    2. The Connelly that might -- heavy on the might -- appeal to you is Blood Work, made into a deeply derivative film starring (and directed by) Clint Eastwood, but actually a very good book and about as close as he got to classic-era detective plotting.

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  6. An excellent Crofts novel. And I agree with the comments on the superiority of Crofts compared to modern exponents of the police procedural.

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