The 9.50 Up Express and Other Stories, page 1
Copyright © 2020
by Crippen & Landru Publishers, Inc. Published by arrangement with the estate of Freeman Wills Crofts
Introduction and Bibliography © 2020 Tony Medawar
Cover artwork by Joshua Luboski
Lost Classics logo, adapted from a drawing by Ike Morgan, ca.
1895
FIRST EDITION
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, recycled paper
For information contact: Crippen & Landru Publishers PO Box 532057
Cincinnati, OH 45253
Jeffrey A. Marks, Publisher
Douglas G. Greene, Senior Editor
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ISBN (softcover): 978-1-932009-34-7
ISBN (clothbound): 978-1-936363-49-0
First Edition: December 2020 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The 9.50 Up Express and Other Stories
FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS (1879 -1957)
CONTENTS
Contents
The Master of Alibis
Part I:
The Casebook of Inspector French
Meet Inspector French
The Vertical Line
The Hunt Ball Murder
The Faulty Stroke
Teamwork Felonious
Dark Waters
The Target
The 9.50 Up Express
During The Night
Part II:
Meet Robin Brand
Perilous Journey
Danger in Shroude Valley
Part III:
Other Stories
James Alcorn’s Oversight
Murder by Deputy
Appendix A:
Why I Write Detective Stories
Appendix B:
Who Killed Cock Robin?
Bibliography
The Master of Alibis
“The soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy.”
Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (1950)
Though he himself would have shunned the title, Freeman Wills Crofts can reasonably be regarded as Ireland’s greatest writer of classic crime. In a career extending over four decades, he delivered a solid series of carefully plotted novels, with a particular penchant for railway mysteries and plots built around other forms of transportation. Described by Agatha Christie as “The Master of Alibis.” and by Dorothy L. Sayers as “Our cunningest fitter of jigsaws.”, Crofts created Joseph French, one of the relatively few great police detectives of the Golden Age of crime and detective fiction, and for many readers the Inspector French novels epitomise fair-play and routinely deliver a smoothly engineered plot in which the only certainty is that, eventually, the truth will out.
Crofts’ forebears were from Suffolk1 in England, but he was named, like his father and his grandfather before him, after his great grandfather, who owned land in Cork in the south of the island of Ireland, where Crofts’ own father was born. Crofts’ mother, Cecilia
Frances Wise, was born in County Down in the north 2east. Freeman Senior and Cecilia were married on 21 February 18782 at Aldershot in England, where he had been training for a career as a surgeon in the medical department of the British Army. In the autumn of the same year, while living with her father, James Wise, Cecilia found that she was pregnant, however, her happiness was short-lived, for at around the same time she learned that her young husband, who had only recently been posted to the British colony of Honduras, had died of fever on the 17 of November. A little over six months later, their son, Freeman Wills Crofts, was born on 1 June 1879 at 26 Waterloo Road in Dublin. Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom but with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 it gained independence and became the Irish Free State with Dublin as its capital. From his father, Crofts inherited the equivalent of roughly $100,000 in today’s money, together with some land in Clogheen and Longstone in Cork. There were questions about the ownership of the land and in the ensuing legal wrangle, the infant had to be represented by James Wise.
In April 1883, Cecilia married again, this time to the Venerable Jonathan Harding, the canon of Dromore. It is likely that the two had met at St Paul’s Church in Gilford, County Down, where Harding was also the rector. On the marriage, Cecilia went to live at the vicarage with her young son who was made the legal ward of his stepfather, whom the child always called uncle. Harding was an eminent Anglican, becoming an archdeacon in 1892, and he and Cecilia ensured that, like his family for generations, Freeman Wills Crofts was raised in the Church of Ireland.
In 1891, after the Hardings moved to Belfast, Crofts took up a place at the city’s prestigious Methodist College, where he won at least one school prize. He left the “Methody” in 1894 after he and a cousin, James Berkeley Wise, were selected for the initial intake of the newly established Campbell College in Belfast, where, among other things, Crofts served as official scorer for the school cricket team.
A year later, the cousins were joined at Campbell by yet another cousin, Hamilton Knutson Deane Roe. Cousin Hamilton would go on to become an actor, under the name Hamilton Deane, and his most famous role was that of Professor Van Helsing in his acclaimed adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was the basis for the celebrated 1931 film. In July 1896, Crofts left Campbell College, but he retained an affection for it for the rest of his life, even serving in 1935 as president of the London Branch of the Old Campbellians’ Society.
At the age of 17, Crofts took up an apprenticeship as a pupil in civil engineering on the Belfast & Northern Counties Railway, the BNCR, where his uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, was chief engineer. Wise mentored his nephew and his career flourished. In 1899, Crofts was promoted to junior assistant engineer and was involved with the building of the Londonderry and Strabane extension of the Donegal railway line. In the following year, Crofts’ stepfather Archdeacon Harding died, and Crofts was promoted first to assistant engineer and then to district engineer, after which appointment he moved with his mother to Coleraine in County Derry.
Crofts’ passion for his work and his energy was boundless. In 1907, he invented a new kind of buffer coupling for railway engines and, even outside work, engineering was never far from his mind. In 1908, he designed a full-sized roller-skating rink, made from rock maple and spruce, which opened in 1909. Crofts was also deeply religious, and in 1902, he was made a sidesman at Holy Trinity Church in Portrush, becoming churchwarden in 1907. He was a skillful musician, and from June 1909 to 1920 played the organ at St John’s Parish church in the nearby village of Killowen, as well as at St Patrick’s, Coleraine. He also designed that church’s organ chamber and established its men’s choir, becoming its first conductor. Crofts also took on various roles in the wider community around in and Coleraine, including chairman of the Coleraine Musical Society and, reflecting his internationalist outlook, secretary of the Portrush Esperanto Club, whose ambition to make Esperanto a global language he would still be championing over thirty years later.
Crofts also served for a while as honorary secretary of the Portrush branch of the Women’s National Health Association and as master of several choirs, including the choir of the local branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, which, under his leadership, performed at the annual Coleraine Music Festival for many years, and in 1921 won the Mary Wakefield Medallion for the best women’s choir. In 1909, Crofts even sang in a variety show at the Northern Counties Hotel in Coleraine, helping to raise funds for the local cricket and croquet teams. He also had many other interests, which he would pursue throughout his life, included gardening, carpentry, motoring and traveling.
In 1912, at the age of thirty-three, Crofts married Mary Bellas Canning, whom he had met at Killowen parish church some 10 years earlier; Paul R Moy, who has revealed many forgotten facts about writers of the Golden Age, has established that their first home was 11 Lodge Road, Killowen. Mary was the daughter of the manager of the Coler aine branch of the Provincial Bank and, while she and Freeman never had children, they would remain together for forty-five years.
Within two years, Europe was at war. Still in his thirties, Crofts was not called up because he was in a reserved occupation, but whether this frustrated or delighted him is unclear. As a civilian, he followed the ruination of Western Europe closely, and in 1915, he invented and patented a war game whose details, sadly, appear to have been lost.
In the second half of the decade, probably in 1916 , Crofts fell ill as a result of contracting influenza in the pandemic. Confined to bed for a lengthy spell of convalescence, and possibly inspired by the incredible by the success of E.C. Bentley’s semi-satirical Trent’s Last Case (1913) and the burgeoning growth in popularity of crime and detective stories, this almost feverishly active man decided to try writing a mystery.3 He asked his wife for a pencil and a few sheets of notepaper and began to write down what to him “seemed the most absurd and improbable things I could think of.” That first morning’s work was followed by a second, and then a chapter was complete. Crofts read what he had written to Mary who “expressed delight (unhappily, mingled with amazement.)” Nonetheless encouraged, he continued to write what would eventually be his first novel until he returned to work. When he came across the manuscript sometime later, he found himself surprised quality of what he had written. He began to revise it, with the help of a neighbour, Dr. Adam Mathers, who acted as a sounding board. Crofts would go on to dedicate the book to Mathers and said later that “the book must have been written at least five times before the final draft was reached”. But reached it was, and in 1919, with no little trepidation, Crofts submitted the final draft of the novel to an agent, Alexander Pollock Watt, regarded today as the first true literary agent and in 1919 very much in the forefront of his profession.
Watt was very impressed and submitted the novel, then entitled A Mystery of Two Cities, to the publisher William Collins, where it was read by the novelist John Davys Beresford. Beresford was full of encouragement, judiciously prompting Crofts to change the final section of the novel in which a trial took place. Crofts accepted Beresford’s advice, commenting in later years that “I don’t know a great deal about murder trials now but I have learnt enough to appreciate that no trial like that I described has ever taken place, either in this or any other country.” Collins were delighted with the revised draft and, in July 1920, Crofts’ first novel was published under a new title, The Cask, one not coined by its author.
As Crofts revealed many years later to the bibliophile Edward T Guymon, he “was the most astounded person in the universe” by the book’s publication and he delighted in the praise for its “bewilderingly intricate” and “skilfully contrived” plot—whose solution, incidentally, was revealed in a contemporary review by one leading Irish newspaper. He decided to write another and the following July saw the publication of the “ably-engineered” The Ponson Case. The manuscript for the next book was completed by the following April, and the novel, The Pit-Prop Syndicate, was published that November, not long after Freeman and Mary had moved to Whiteabbey, a small coastal village near Belfast near Jordanstown, where they lived at 22 The Oaks and Crofts played the organ at St Patrick’s Church.
At around this time, Crofts also decided to try his hand at short stories. The first, “The Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express” was published in The Premier Magazine in 1922; Crofts later revealed that he had tested the practicability of his plot with a rope and a railway coach and the active cooperation of the District Superintendent.
In October 1922, Crofts was appointed to the position of chief assistant engineer at around the time the BNCR was being absorbed into the London, Midland and Scottish Railway, a name that says much about the sensitivities of the British authorities at the time to the growing calls for Irish independence. Crofts transferred to the railway’s headquarters at York Road station in Belfast where one of his earliest assignments was to design a new railway bridge over the river Bann in Coleraine harbour; this would replace a wooden bridge whose flaws Crofts had first criticised nearly fifteen years earlier. He was also involved in the design of the Greenisland viaduct near Bleach Green on the Belfast to Larne railway line.
Notwithstanding his demanding job, Crofts managed to find time to continue writing. His fourth novel, The Groote Park Murder (1923), is set in South Africa and Scotland, and prompted one newspaper to hail its author as “a distinguished member of that little group of public benefactors, the writers of really good detective stories.” Crofts became increasingly confident that he could consider a career as a writer and a writer of detective stories and, either of his own volition or—perhaps more likely—in response to pressure from his publisher, Crofts decided to create a series detective.
At school, Crofts had been “immensely” impressed by Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes and his favourite writer of detective stories was R. Austin Freeman, creator of the preternaturally intelligent Dr. John Thorndyke and the best-known practitioner of the inverted detective story that would also be a feature of Crofts’ work. However, Crofts decided that he would do something different, eschewing the idea of creating a “superhuman” sleuth or even a “character detective” as created by the likes of Philip Macdonald, S.S. Van Dine, and Christie. Instead, and building on the various police officers that had appeared in his first four books like Inspector Tanner, the main investigator of The Ponson Case he created Joseph French, “an ordinary man, carrying out his work in an ordinary way [without any] special characteristics except being thorough, painstaking, persistent and a hard worker. He makes mistakes but goes ahead in spite of them.”
The first of the series was Inspector French’s Greatest Case (1924) and, while Crofts’ books were already being criticised for the scant attention to characterisation—a weakness Crofts recognised—the suave “Soapy Joe” French was an immediate success. In the second, Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1925), the policeman appeared late in the book, resolving a puzzle that an amateur would-be investigator had failed to unravel. Over the next thirty-three years, French would appear in nearly thirty novels and over fifty short stories, as well as radio plays and a stage play.
Already acclaimed in the United Kingdom and in Ireland, Crofts began to gain popularity in other countries, including the United States where he would be hailed in 1927 as “The Crime King.” Praised for his scrupulously “fair” and “logical” plotting and for creating the “plodding, painstaking,” French was widely regarded as, at the time, the most realistic of fictional detectives. An unwelcome consequence of such laudation, however, was that some reviewers delighted in nit-picking, especially those working for the Belfast News. Thus, one review queried the accuracy of the description of the phases of the moon in Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery (1926) and another the prevalence of particular types of tide in Inspector French’s fourth case, The Sea Mystery (1928). Such comments were not always well-founded. Given his attention to detail, one can imagine how Crofts reacted to the misplaced criticism that he had erred in a later French mystery—Fatal Venture (1939)—by having the Royal Ulster Constabulary investigate a crime in the north of the island of Ireland rather than Eire’s Garda Síochána.
Even Crofts’ friends were not above tweaking his ears. The writer John Rhode—of whose work Crofts was a great admirer—once calculated that a key aspect of the plot of The Sea Mystery, involving a crate, was impossible. Another friend teased Crofts about a different novel in which the author had underestimated the weight of a large quantity of bank notes and the volume that it would occupy.
Regardless of minor issues, few of which were detected by his readers, Crofts was immensely popular. However, not all of his books were successful. Despite an interesting and complex problem involving serial murder, the drug trade and the counterfeiting of silver coinage, French’s fifth case, The Box Office Murders (1929), was poorly received, with one reviewer speaking for many when he dismissed it as “overweighted and over-complicated”. Crofts shrugged off such criticism and, recognising that he could no longer deal with the twin pressures of work as an engineer and work as a writer, he decided at the age of fifty to become a full-time author. His mother, Cecilia Harding, had died in 1929, and Freeman and Mary decided to move to Britain.
However, before they could put this plan into effect, Crofts received a most unusual assignment. In May 1930, through an appointment that may have raised some eyebrows at the time, the “popular novelist” was appointed by the Minister of Finance as an inspector to chair a two-day public inquiry to consider community and commercial objections to a drainage scheme for the river Bann near his home in Coleraine. Sensing a degree of innocent misunderstanding as well as some not so innocent obfuscation, Crofts used the bulk of the first day to examine the proposals in great detail, as a result of which many objections were simply withdrawn. After completing the hearings, he wrote up his report and supported the majority of the remaining objections, arguing that they should be addressed by compensation or modification of the scheme. His conclusions were accepted and the works began, taking 12 years to complete and costing approximately $60,000,000 in today’s money.
After the publication of the report on the drainage scheme, Freeman and Mary completed their relocation, settling in the tiny village of Blackheath near Guildford in the south east of England. They bought a newly built house, Wildern, which has since come to be known as Crofts; still standing, Crofts is a charming house and, quite coincidentally, is presently the home of an Ulsterwoman who, like Crofts, attended Methodist College and at one time lived in Coleraine.
