The Ponson Case

A review of The Ponson Case by Freeman Wills Crofts

It is often with a sense of foreboding that I pick up one of Freeman Wills Crofts’ novels as no matter how expertly the plot is constructed and how intricate the mystery, there will be periods where the narrative gets bogged down and the reader will wonder whether it is worth persevering with. However, The Ponson Case, published in 1921 and the second of four novels Crofts wrote before introducing his signature police sleuth, Inspector French, seems to navigate around more of the aggravating features of the later works of his that I have read.

To give him his due, Crofts is a good storyteller, and he has an unerring knack of constructing seemingly bullet-proof alibis which will withstand even the most painstaking investigation, the timing of journeys by motor car and by foot and the inevitable consultation of Bradshaw’s railway timetables. In a bow to modernity, Inspector tanner, the ‘tec in charge of investigations, even flies to Paris from Croydon Airport, seconds a fast car and with minutes to spare makes his train connection which takes him to Lisbon.

Crofts also plays fair with the reader, one of the advantages of being meticulous in his description of the investigations is that the reader has available to them all the clues that enable to work out whodunit, if not why it was done. He also takes time to delineate his principal characters and they are believable, not the stereotypes that populate many novels of this genre and time. I particularly enjoyed the tobacconist, who certainly knew his tobaccos and filters.  

Inspector Tanner is certainly an honest, hard-working detective for whom no minutiae that the case throws up should go ignored. The storyline centres around the discovery of Sir William Ponson’s body in a river near his home. Ponson is a rich, self-made industrialist. At first glance, it looks as though it was either suicide or a tragic accident in which Ponson lost control of his craft and was swept away by the tricky current in the area, but the discovery of a savage blow to the back of his head, leads Tanner to suspect that he was murdered.

Tanner’s problem is that the principal suspects who stand to gain most from the death of Ponson, son Austin and playboy nephew Cosgrove, both with money problems and both wanting to marry women the pater familias disapproves of, have rock solid alibis, which Tanner spends the first half of the book scrupulously investigating and testing, even travelling up to Montrose to check a single point. For all the signs of the dawning of modern age that appear in the book, the use of a telephone as a means of interrogating a suspect does not appear to be one.

Tanner is struggling to make progress, even if there are only three plausible suspects, the third being a mysterious stranger who left footprints at the boathouse. Satisfied that he can at least make a case against Austin, Tanner arrests him, an action which provokes a change of perspective in the second part of the novel, with the introduction of Austin’s fiancée, Lois Drew and her solicitor cousin, Jimmy Daunt. They try to prove Austin’s innocence and do their own investigations into the pair’s alibis and discover that for all of Tanner’s meticulous work, he has missed a trick.

This together with the discovery of the identity of the mysterious stranger, necessitating a visit by Tanner to Portugal to collar him and affording Crofts to engage in a bit of xenophobia, moves the story along to its denouement. Along the way we discover blackmail and unwitting bigamy. The actions of Ponson and his two relatives all make some sort of sense as the resolution of the mystery is revealed, leaving no loose ends, but the climax is more than a tad disappointing after such an exhaustive investigation.   

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but it could easily have been much shorter.

Inspector French And The Starvel Hollow Tragedy

A review of Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy by Freeman Wills Crofts

I always find that I have to take a deep breath before I plunge into a book by Wills Crofts. They can be hard going at times with Crofts’ penchant for a detailed unravelling of the methods deployed in a usually exquisitely plotted crime. In this, his seventh, originally published in 1927 and also known as The Starvel Tragedy, the third to feature Inspector Joseph French, the tone is quite different and makes for an entertaining and page-turning read. It is the best of his tales that I have read.

French can be guilty of being a tad vainglorious, several times during the book musing that his successful resolution of the case will almost certainly guarantee him promotion, and also a little slow on the uptake, having been handed a clue that would speed up his enquiries and failing to recognise its import until almost too late and not realising that one of the characters upon whom he is relying to snare the culprit is not all that he seems. The denouement of the case is dramatic, partly because of the latter failing, but French manages to get out of a situation which could have been curtains for him and the culprit is left with an appointment with the hangman’s noose. The moral of the story is a nick will get you nicked.

The plot is complex, as you would expect, although it hardly seems so at the outset. Starvel is a house out in the wilds of Yorkshire and lived in by a miser, Simon Averill, his niece Ruth, and their two servants, the Ropers. Ruth who has led a miserable life, brightened only by an incipient courtship with Pierce Whymper, is invited to stay a week in York with a family she barely knows. Her visit is curtailed when she receives the tragic news that the house has been burnt down in a ferocious fire and that the three occupants have been killed. Worse still, Averill’s money, which he kept in a safe and was estimated to be in excess of £30,000, had been burnt to cinders.

What looks like a tragic accident takes on a different complexion when the local bank manager sometime later reveals his suspicions about the loss of the money as the safe was fireproof. A note, whose number tallied with one that the bank had recently sent to Averill, is found in circulation and is traced to Whymper, who has cooled his relationship with Ruth. Scotland Yard are called in by the local force and French is sent to investigate.

What he unravels is a complex, long-planned crime which involves theft, the murder of three, and eventually a tally of five, as well as a spot of coffin robbing and blackmail. French’s investigations take his to Scotland and France as well as seeing him shuttle back and forth from London to Yorkshire. Although he makes several major mistakes, French’s genius is to see the bigger picture while methodically and painstakingly investigating every lead, no matter how unpromising, to wherever it leads him, often a dead end. He is stoical when frustrated and moves on with a sigh but with enthusiasm undiminished to the next lead, often supplied to him from conversation he strikes up with one of the chatty locals.   

Crofts has constructed a story that is packed with incident and even though the bones of the plot and possibly even the culprit is evident midway through its telling, there are plenty of spills and thrills and red herrings to keep the reader on the edge of their settee until the dramatic end. Justice is served and not only the baddies but also the good guys get their just desserts.

The Hog’s Back Mystery

The Hog’s Back Mystery – Freeman Wills Crofts

Crofts can be an exasperating writer. He produces superb plots, well considered, immaculately described, but his sheer dogged determination to tale the reader through all the minutiae of a police investigation and to leave no stone unturned can produce a wearisome read. The Hog’s Back Mystery, his fourteenth novel, published originally in 1933 and reissued for a modern audience as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics imprint, is a case in point. You cannot fault it for its construction and plotting but upon completing the final page I was left with the impression that it was about a hundred pages too long.

As a story it is a product of its time, concerning middle class people in the years between the two World Wars, who had maids, chauffeurs, cooks and gardeners that a thorough detective can interview, where chemists still make up prescriptions according to a doctor’s scrip and where everyone seems to go to a café for tea in the middle of the afternoon. Inspector French, Crofts’ detective creation, has an unhurried but painfully thorough approach to investigation, travelling from place to place either on foot, bicycle, or train. No fast cars, screaming sirens and flashing blue lights here.

Crofts does not go in much for characterisation. What makes Inspector French tick is as much a mystery at the end of the book as the start. He is a conscientious, determined policeman who always, after some effort, gets his culprit. No detective’s intuition, just hard graft here. All the other characters are given as much colour as is necessary to make them believable for the part they play in the story but no more. Crofts is more interested in the intricacies of his plot than in developing a rounded novel.

His determination to be seen to play fair with his readership is exemplified in the final two chapters. When French is recounting how he pieced together the clues to link not one but four murders – you certainly get your money’s worth in body counts in this tale – and to arrive at whodunit, each clue is cross-referenced with a page number allowing the reader, if they so wish, to go back and satisfy themselves that the clue was really there. I had worked out halfway through the story whodunit and, frankly, I would have thought that a detective as clever as French would have done too, although how it was all done was another matter. Here, Crofts meticulous eye for detail and timing, he was an engineer before turning his hand to writing, comes to the fore.

As the title suggests, the story is set in the Hog’s Back area of Surrey, not too far from where I live, and I am always fascinated to learn how the area looked before it underwent substantial suburbanisation. The disappearance of a doctor, James Earle, kicks the story off. It was substantiated that he had not intended to leave the house because he was still wearing his slippers and had not taken his hat and coat. Unhappily married, French initially suspects that he was having an affair with a nurse who also disappears on the same night. A fortnight later Ursula Stone, a friend of Mrs Earle and who was staying at the house, and who had spotted Earle meeting a woman in London surreptitiously also disappears and French begins to suspect murder. And what do these disappearances and deaths have to do with the recent death of a wealthy man, Mr Frazer?

It all makes sense in the end and, despite all my comments, it was an enjoyable if heavy read. Crofts is a master craftsman when it comes to the ingenuity of and the unravelling of a crime and should be appreciated as such.

Inspector French’s Greatest Case

Inspector French’s Greatest Case – Freeman Wills Crofts

I am in two minds about Freeman Wills Crofts as a writer. When he is on form, he is undeniably good but all too often he seems to get bogged down in the minutiae of the case, explaining in excruciating detail how the solution was arrived at through the examination of tide tables, railway timetables and the like. In this 1924 tale, Crofts’ fifth but the first in which his long-standing ‘tec, Inspector Joseph French aka “Soapy Joe”, appears, French does a lot of travelling, following a lead that almost inevitably peters out into a dead end,  and the reader is regaled with details of the route and the towns and cities through which his train takes him. Surely it is enough to say he got from A to B by x.

My other bug bear is with French himself. He is not a brilliant detective who relies on a flash of inspiration or highly tuned deductive powers, but rather a plodder. We know he will get there in the end, and, as the rather odd introduction in my edition penned by Crofts in 1935 admits, we know that whatever perilous situation he finds himself in, he will survive. “I have to admit that he’s not very brilliant: in fact, many people call him dull”, Crofts comments. Police investigative work, and bear in mind French is a professional policeman, not a gifted amateur sleuth, is all about putting in the hard work, being completely methodical, following leads to wherever they may take you. French personifies this approach.

Interestingly, it is an amateur who provides French with his inspiration and a different angle to viewing the set of problems before him, his wife, Emily. The long-suffering woman, who seems to be content to play the housewife, is regaled with the details of the case her hubby is working on, when he deigns to come home to put his feet up, smoke a pipe and eat his meal. Was this use of Emily recognition by Crofts that his main man was a little too predictable and that the plot needed a bit of a jolt if it were ever to reach a satisfactory conclusion? Inspiration is more entertaining than hard graft, after all.

The case itself is relatively straightforward, at least at the outset. Mr Getting, the head clerk of a firm of diamond merchants in Hatton Gardens, Duke and Peabody, is found murdered late at night on the premises, the safe door is open, and diamonds to the value of £33,000 and £1,000 in cash is missing. French is called in to investigate. The plot is not overly complicated but, despite having a number of clues and a small pool of suspects to work on and doggedly pursuing each lead, taking him to Switzerland and on board a ship en route to Brazil, French is under increasing pressure to produce a result.

The reported death of Mr Duke, who has led a double life, expedites the conclusion of the case. French gets there in the end, but it took a mighty long and circuitous path to get there.

There are better French tales and better Crofts’ stories than this, but it is entertaining enough. While the sums involved in the murder and robbery are large by the standards of the time, I’m not sure quite why the book merits the title it has. If you are going to embark on a series involving a single character, it is probably not the smartest move to suggest that the reader’s first encounter with him is as good as it is going to get.

Mystery On Southampton Water

Mystery on Southampton Water – Freeman Wills Crofts

Published in 1934 with the alternative title of Crime on the Solent in the States, this is the 12^th in the Joseph French series and was reissued last year (2020) to celebrate Crofts’ centenary as a published author. This is another inverted mystery, in which Crofts excels, where the reader is first introduced to the crime and the culprit(s) before following the work of the police in unravelling the mystery and unmasking the criminal.

The book starts from what seems, superficially at least, unpromising beginnings, concerning itself with the manufacture of concrete. Dull as this may seem, Crofts has managed to construct a compelling and fascinating story, involving industrial espionage which goes wrong. The Joymount Cement Company is in financial difficulties, an eventually that could spell ruin to its senior management team, as we would know the, now. Their local rivals, Chayle’s, on the other side of the Solent, have stolen a march on the competition by developing a new form of concrete which is cheaper to make.  

King, Brand, and Tasker, from Joymount, decide to try and replicate the formula as a last throw of the dice before the company is wound up. The scientist, King, struggles to come up with the formula and suggests to Brand that they should take a more direct route by breaking into Chayle’s and steal the formula. This they do, although Chayle’s unfortunate security guard dies during the initial attempt. Through a rather elaborate, and probably unnecessary, plan King and Brand try to make the guard’s demise look like suicide. Once he has his hands on the formula, King is able to replicate the cement and the day appears to have been saved.

Through their market intelligence, the big wigs at Chayle’s realise that Joymount have their hands on the formula and attempt to blackmail them into agreeing a substantial royalty fee. After the final meeting at which an agreement is concluded, the Chayle’s senior management team board a boat to sail to the other side of the Solent, making an unscheduled stop en route. An explosion rips through the boat, killing two of the three, Mairs and de Havilland, but crucially not the third. Have Joymount escaped the consequences of the onerous penalty clause in their agreement?

They quickly realise it is a false dawn as Inspector French doggedly disproves the suicide theory and works out how the explosion on the boat was carried out and by whom. Critics of Crofts will point out that he is exhaustive in his attempts to explain the rationale behind his detective’s deductions. It can be wearisome, not as much as in a second-rate Thorndyke tale, but, if you are prepared to roll with it can provide some intellectual rigour to the solving of a knotty problem, even if at the expense of some entertainment.

That said, it is a well-crafted tale and more entertaining than a brief synopsis may suggest. Murder at the time carried with it the death penalty and Crofts plays on the psychological impact that that prospect has on Brand, in particular, and to a lesser extent on King and Tasker. The other thing that might strike the modern reader as a tad odd is the leisurely pace at which the incident is investigated. No screeching of tyres and Sweeney-like acts of derring-do. French and his team are content to travel by train, ferry and even bus. Innocent days.  

I enjoyed the book and will read more of Crofts.