Crofts, Freeman Wills - Golden Ashes (1940)

After reviewing The Loss of the 'Jane Vosper' so favourably a week ago it is slightly depressing to come to Golden Ashes, written fifteen years later. Crofts was only sixty-one when the book was written, but to me at least it had the feeling of a writer slightly out of his depth and struggling to cope with modern developments. Perhaps Crofts was merely feeling tired: after twenty-eight books he had a right to.

The book begins with the story of Betty Stanton, recently widowed and now jobless. Her sister, a nursemaid on an ocean liner, strikes up an acquaintance with Sir Geoffrey Buller, an expatriate Englishman from Chicago who has recently and unexpectedly inherited an English baronetcy and and an estate, and is returning to take possession. He is looking for a housekeeper; so Betty's sister puts them in touch, and soon Betty Stanton is running the large and gloomy Forde Manor.

Buller is an unattractive character from the very first, and we soon learn that he has secrets, so it comes as no surprise when there is skullduggery with the painting collection at Forde Manor, and later when the house is burnt down. A friend of Betty's happens to be an art expert, and when he disappears after having examined the paintings, Inspector French is called in.

French is his usual thorough self, ably assisted here by an insurance investigator called Shaw. There are questions, interviews, no fewer than three trips to Paris, and the customary painstaking accumulation of evidence -- but all it does in the end is to confirm what we had already guessed. What it adds up to is a remarkably clumsy plot, in which the villains behave with an odd mixture of idiocy and brilliance. Potential arsonists take note: don't do it this way.

I wonder if making his criminals moronic was Crofts' concession to modern 'realism'? If so he seems to have changed his mind halfway through, perhaps when he realised what dull reading it made. Not a bad book by normal standards; but mediocre for Crofts.

Jon.