Crofts, Freeman Wills - Fatal Venture

Fatal Venture (1939) is known as Tragedy in the Hollow in the United States. The whole book reminds one of Crofts' idol, R. Austin Freeman. Like many of Freeman's books, the story falls into two parts, one part showing events from the point of view of a young man, the second showing the mystery solved by the detective. As in Freeman's Felo de Se? (aka Death at the Inn) (1937), this book has an anti-gambling theme. The young hero of the story innocently covers up elements of the crime, to protect his girlfriend. Later we see Inspector French uncover these. The whole thing reminds one of one of Freeman's inverted stories, with the detective finding clues to unravel a crime we have already seen. Finally, in the last section of the story, Crofts finally gets down to his own specialty, the breaking down of alibis. Even here, the technological aspects remind one of Freeman.

Fatal Venture suffers from the fact that so much of the book has nothing to do with the mystery. Nearly the entire first half deals in detail with a scheme to launch a cruise ship that would travel round the British Isles. Crofts loved boats, and he goes into this scheme with enormous gusto. It is almost as if Crofts were writing the book to outline a real life business venture. These parts are readable and entertaining. However, they deal with a fantasy of Crofts', unlike The Cask, which shows us part of the real world, Paris and the shipping business. When the murder does finally occur on page 93, it takes place on shore, during a tourist excursion to Northern Ireland, and the whole cruise ship aspect of the book has nothing to do with the crime. In many ways, the actual mystery portions of the book would form a short story, and only the non-mystery sections expand the work to novel length. Freeman's Mr Polton Explains (1940) will also combine a mainstream, non-mystery first half with a mystery novel second half.

The book shows the ambiguity with which British writers viewed business. Crofts is gung ho about his business scheme. He is one of the few Golden Age British novelists to take an interest in business. The book is rich in detail about business negotiations were conducted, and how new enterprises were formed in the 1930's. But he also shows his businessmen to be grasping and amoral, and much of the business enterprise to be immoral. Americans today tend to think of a "booming economy" in which every economic advance helps other people also make money. Crofts asserts however that "one man's profit is another man's loss", and depicts business as a zero sum game with winners and losers.

The young hero wears uniform on ship, something to which he is not really entitled, but which pleases him no end - see the start of Chapter 6. There are elements of Rogue fiction tradition here, and the way Rogues like to assume the clothes of the upper classes as part of their schemes. This recalls other Rogue-influenced characters in Crofts, such as the sneaky policeman Inspector Tanner in The Ponson Case, who also likes to dress up in misleading clothes, and the fluent liar James Dangle in The Cheyne Mystery.

Mike Grost