The End of Andrew Harrison (1938) by Freeman Wills Crofts

Freeman Wills Crofts was the Golden Age detective story's first and foremost manufacturer of unbreakable, steel-lined alibis, but, during the 1930s, Crofts "contributed a couple of his plodding stories" to the locked room pantheon that remained stubbornly elusive and hard-to-find – despite some relatively recent reprints. House of Stratus reissued Sudden Death (1932) and The End of Andrew Harrison (1938) in 2001, which soon went out-of-print again as copies became scarce, expensive collector's items. There was a period not all that long ago when booksellers asked hundreds of dollars or euros for a secondhand copy without a blush of shame.

Fortunately, Collins Crime Club has been working diligently the past few years on reprinting the entire Inspector French series in chronological order. 

Sudden Death reappeared back in print in 2020 and it lived up to expectations as it was fascinating to watch Crofts, the original "Alibi King," turn his mind to a well wrought locked room mystery. The End of Andrew Harrison finally got its long-awaited infusion of fresh ink back in September and can now cross-out both titles on my locked room wishlist. But is it as good or even better than Sudden Death? Only one way to find out! 

The End of Andrew Harrison, published in the US as The Futile Alibi, begins with a young, anxious Markham Crewe preparing the brave "the biggest milestone he had yet reached in his one-and-twenty years of life" as his "whole future career" depended on it. Markham Crewe had an easy, care-free life until his father unexpectedly died, thrown from his horse when riding to hounds, and with him had gone "the vastly greater part of his money" – which left him with a yearly income of two-hundred pounds. A small fortune to some people, but Crewe sees it as "a pittance barely sufficient for pocket money." Let alone enough to indulge his expensive tastes and habits. Just as he began to despair, a friend of his father alerted him to a job opportunity with no less a figure than the well-known millionaire and financier, Andrew Harrison. Harrison is angling for a peerage and needs "a gentleman to run his social affairs," like a society secretary, so he can attend to his business.

However, Harrison has a thoroughly unpleasant reputation as both a businessman and human being. The law had never been able to touch any of his dirty business deals, but, as a human, the kindest things said about him "crooked as they make them" and "dirty lying swine." While those "remarks with real feeling behind them scarcely lent themselves to the printed page." Crewe pretty soon discovers this sentiment extend to his wife and children as his home life is not a happy one, but seething with barely repressed hatred. So there are more than enough motives for murder to go around and the possibility of foul play is considered when Harrison goes missing when he returned to England from a business trip to Paris. Somehow, the press is the first to get a clue Harrison has vanished and the newspaper headlines, "WELL-KNOWN FINANCIER MISSING," which began to wreak havoc on Harrison's stock. If he didn't turn up quickly, a complete collapse is unavailable.

Surprisingly, Harrison turned up to tell everything had been a huge mistake as he had been with a friend on a yacht and had not seen the newspapers, but "there had been, however, some terrible cases of loss" and "already three suicides had taken place" – except the financier who made a pretty packet out of the scarce. Just like in Mystery on the Channel (1930), you can occasionally catch a glimpse of Crofts' disapproval bleeding through the story. This does not prevent Harrison from throwing a holiday party on his specially designed, giant-sized and motorized houseboat, the Cygnet, where he dies under mysterious circumstances. On a July morning, Harrison does not respond to the steward knocking on his cabin door and the door is eventually broken open. Harrison is lying dead in his bed with "a livid, almost leaden shade" and the doctor determined the cause of death was carbon dioxide gas poisoning. Near the bed on a table was a bowl full of scraps of marble, which "gave clear traces of having been acted on by acid." Since the door had been dead-bolted from the inside and the port windows were closed, the inquest returned a verdict of suicide. Chief Constable is not satisfied and asks Scotland Yard to give the evidence a second look.

Chief Inspector Joseph French is put in charge of the case and, while he initially inclined to agree with the local inspector that "the details of the death precluded anything but suicide," he nonetheless methodically begins to sift through the evidence.

Firstly, there's the problem whether, or not, it could have been murder and presents a two-pronged problem: how did the murderer manage to leave a locked cabin and why had Harrison not reacted to the murderer pouring acid over the marble chips? That problem is easier posed than answered. French more than once becomes convinced over the course of his investigation "there had been no murder," because all the evidence insisted "no murderer had left the cabin" until discovering something in the cabin that makes suicide untenable. Secondly, having now established murder, French has to work out how the murderer got out of the locked cabin. And he goes to work on that problem with the same meticulous, painstaking eye for detail ("what another person could devise, he could discover"). French unlocked the solution to that problem about halfway through the story, but every new discovery reveals a new pesky puzzle to solve and every answer places a new complexion on the case or what happened in the first half dozen chapters. 

The End of Andrew Harrison won't convince Crofts detractors who find him slow, boring and a bit on the dry side of his genius, but it should be noted that French's customary plodding and thoroughness is not necessary due to it being a so-called "humdrum" detective novel. This time, it sort of serves a purpose as Crofts carefully builds towards an unexpected, genuinely surprising, turn of events as the case began to unravel very rapidly – not always in the way French had envisioned it. I was as surprise as French at the ending of the penultimate chapter, because I had completely accepted a previous assumption (ROT13: n tbbq, byq-snfuvbarq uhzqehz-fglyr pevzvany pbafcvenpl ghearq zheqrebhf) as fact. After all, it perfectly fitted the style of the story and what preceded it. So did Crofts understood his audience and decided to use their expectations to take them for a ride? And that curve ball he threw was not only clued, but even psychologically foreshadowed! I think the who-and why actually ended up being better than the how.

So an excellent, meticulously reconstructive detective novel, but, purely as a locked room mystery, is it as good as 1932 predecessor? I already gave away the answer to that question (nope), but that answer requires an explanation.

Robert Adey commented in Locked Room Murders (1991) that "Sudden Death is the more obvious locked room problem, but The End of Andrew Harrison is a rather better book on all counts." Having now read both, Adey's take is surprising. Whether you like Sudden Death better than The End of Andrew Harrison depends on how much of a locked room fanboy you happen to be. Sudden Death is a locked room proper with not one, but two, impossible crimes and uses a trick that has now become old hat, but Sudden Death appears to the first one to have employed it. On top of that, it has a proto-locked room lecture predating the famous Locked Room Lecture from John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1935). So it has some historical weight besides being a very well crafted locked room mystery from an alibi specialist. The locked room-trick in The End of Andrew Harrison is good and acceptable enough, but not a classic of its kind and more along the lines of Miles Burton's Death in the Tunnel (1936). It's surprising to see the man who compiled Locked Room Murders preferred The End of Andrew Harrison over Sudden Death. Is this how I come across to Jim?

Nevertheless, the locked room is, as said, not bad at all nor did it needed to carry the whole plot. A first-class plot designed and put together with care and patience, which French pulled apart with the same amount of skills and time-consuming patience. French is not merely a calculator in human skin who coldly equates every possible combination, until he reaches the correct solution. French is an intelligent, levelheaded policeman, but he can get frustrated when he keeps smacking into brick walls or a short-cut to a fast conclusion is cut off. Neither is he an infallible detective. French can get it wrong (..."he shouldn't have allowed circumstances to mislead him") that forces him to take a few steps back again. I liked how French, logically and reasonably, reviewed his own handling of the case in the final chapter and "shivered when he thought how near he had been to making a terrible mistake." A mistake that could have wiped out a good deal of his prestige, but he had succeeded in closing a difficult case. So you also gets a glimpse of both his professional and personal pride (..."hadn't reckoned with Joseph French"). You don't need to know any sordid detail of character's private life to make them relatable or human. That's what makes Crofts' detective novels so alluring to some of us. They're a cool, shaded oasis of reason and normal, everyday common sense.