Mystery in the Channel

November 7, 2016
At the start of Crofts’s solid seventh procedural featuring Scotland Yard’s Inspector French, first published in 1931 (after Sir John Magill’s Last Journey), a steamship encounters a yacht adrift in the English Channel. Aboard the smaller boat are the corpses of two men, who were partners in Moxon’s General Securities, an investment firm. The Sussex County Constabulary calls on French to investigate. The grim find comes after the firm declared a deficit of about £8 million, causing a panic on the British Stock Exchange. A third partner and the accountant have gone missing as well. French methodically evaluates means, motive, opportunity, and the proffered alibis, after concluding that the killer was no stranger to his victims. Modern readers may find this entry in the British Library Classics series a bit dry, but it’s one of Crofts’s better efforts, redeemed by touches of humor (e.g., French’s greatest friendship on the force “survived perhaps the greatest test which could have been imposed on it, a walking tour in the Scottish highlands lasting for ten days”).

October 15, 2016
A yacht adrift in the English Channel whose only passengers are two dead men poses a challenge for Scotland Yard's Inspector Joseph French in this reprint of a tale first published in 1931.Midway from Newhaven to Dieppe, Capt. Hewitt, of the Chichester, spots a yacht whose only sign of life is a man lying on the deck. The crewmen who board the Nymph find that the man is dead. So is another man in the cabin. Both of them have been shot to death, and both of them, according to John Patrick Nolan, who shortly arrives on a motor launch to join them on what he had no idea would be their very last trip, were partners in Moxon's General Securities. Nolan tells the Sussex County police that Paul Moxon, chairman of the firm, and his vice-chairman, Sydney Deeping, were supposedly en route to meet a French financier named Pasteur in Fecamp. But ubiquitous rumors of Moxon Securities' imminent collapse that seem to have reached every pair of ears in England except Nolan's suggest a more sinister errand: the partners, unable to meet their obligations, grabbed everything they could convert into cash and skedaddled. In that case, wonders French, what became of the cash and the murder weapon and the murderer, all apparently vanished from the middle of the Channel? Veterans of golden-age whodunits will know that no one reads Crofts for his prose or his people. But the plot itself is watertight, if not exactly abounding in surprises, and the detection has dated surprisingly little.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 1, 2016
Wills Crofts is one of the masters of the golden age of British detective fiction. Like many of his mystery-writing peers, Crofts enjoyed tremendous popularity during the 1920s and '30s, but his novels gradually fell out of print, until the British Library began salvaging mystery classics from its archives a few years ago. This seventh in the Inspector French series (which ran to 18 books) shows us why Crofts was once so popular. He gives us an all-but-impossible puzzle, suspects with unimpeachable alibis, and an utterly dogged detective skilled at finding the killer and cracking the killer's ingenious modus operandi by analyzing tiny inconsistencies in timing and mechanics. In this latest reissue (the novel was originally published in 1931), the captain of a ferry working the English Channel spies a pleasure yacht with an inert form on the deck. This turns out to be a body, shot through the head. Further searching reveals a second man below, also shot, but no weapon and no other people can be found. The two victims were chief executives with Moxon General Securities, a financial power suddenly on the brink of ruin. Inspector Joseph French of Scotland Yard is called in to sort through a case crowded with sailing and financial lore. Not only is this a first-rate puzzler, but Crofts' outrage over the financial firm's betrayal of the public trust should resonate with today's readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)