Crofts, Freeman Wills - Crime at Guildford / The Crime at Nornes (1935)

Freeman Wills Crofts is an author who has not fared particularly well with modern reviewers of classic crime fiction, including some on this site, a curious situation given his undoubted popularity and the critical acclaim he accrued during his career. Reading this, his first book on return to Collins Crime Club after a brief stint with Hodder and Stoughton, one can begin to comprehend some of the possible reasons why. Once again, Crofts offers a complex plot of jewel robbery and murder, painstakingly investigated by the methodical Chief Inspector French, with the aid of the resources of Scotland Yard.

The book starts rather clunkily, with a stodgy prose style that doesn’t improve much over the next 300 pages. Things get a little more interesting when French is called in to investigate a large robbery at Nornes, a firm of jobbing jewellers, and when he discovers that one of the directors of the company has died over the same weekend he embarks on a complex investigation. As usual, he makes progress by doggedly collating statements and legwork rather than by any inspired ratiocination. The story culminates in a chase across Northern Europe before the perpetrators of both crimes are apprehended.

Unfortunately, once again Crofts relies on a conspiracy of several persons to explain the mechanism of the crime, one important aspect of which will be discernable to the seasoned mystery reader at least fifty pages before it occurs to French. While Crofts is again strong on technical and topographical subjects, his other favoured subject – that of the man of commerce or industry threatened with ruin due to the depression – is less successful than in other books, since the reader feels absolutely no sympathy with the perpetrators here. Altogether, solid but unspectacular, this is one of the weaker Crofts efforts from this period.

R E Faust

Review by Nick Fuller

3/5

Quite typical Crofts. The opening is poor enough to make the reader have second thoughts about continuing, for the first chapter is off-puttingly technical, and hence very dull. Interest picks up in the next chapter with the murder of the accountant of a failing business at the Guildford house of the chairman, on whom suspicion falls, along with five other people. Chief Insp. French, investigating the theft of jewels worth three-quarters of a million from the company safe, co-operates with, and solves the murder case for, the Guildford Superintendent. The detection is typical Crofts: no great deductive feats, but the slow accumulation of alibis, construction and abandonment of theories, to gather proof against the three guilty people (far too many!) suspected from halfway through, whose ingenious plot relies on impersonation and a ciné-camera. The anti-climax takes place in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.