| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

The Box Office Murders

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 3 months ago

Crofts, Freeman Wills - The Box Office Murders

 

Freeman Wills Crofts' The Box Office Murders (1929) is an unusual book for the Golden Age. Despite its title, it is hardly focused on murder. Mainly, it is a story of three crooks who are in charge of a big crime scheme, which somehow centers on theater box offices. The story revolves around Inspector French's attempts to uncover the nature of this crime scheme, and gather evidence against the trio. Although the three commit murder to protect their scheme, the murders are almost irrelevant to the story, which focuses on French's efforts to unravel the Big Scheme, instead. There is no whodunit aspect to the tale - the three crooks are identified right at the start of the story - and little mystery surrounding the killings. Instead, the mysteries in the tale surround the crime Scheme itself. What is it? How is pulled off technologically - there is a great deal of technological and engineering detail in the story. How is it organized? There is also a great deal of emphasis in the novel on police detective work. French comes up with an endless number of ingenious ways to gather evidence against the crooks. The book is 250 pages of pure detection.

 

Evaluating the quality of this book is a bit difficult. The work is very readable: in fact I downed most of it in a single sitting, which is quite unusual for the often labored Crofts. It gains big plusses from being a logically organized exposition of a single theme. There is almost no padding in the novel: every chapter has something new to add to the big picture. Some of French's detective work is fascinating, and it is really pleasant to see such a determined approach to detection, which is too often neglected today. However, the book can get repetitive, and is very narrowly focused: there is little in the way of characterization, there is little plot in the conventional sense, and most of the whodunit mechanism of the Golden Age is simply missing. The work can seem thin, and even trivial. It is nowhere as rich as Crofts' classic The Cask (1920). However, Crofts deserves big plusses for trying something original, and for pulling it off so well.

 

Crofts includes a Jewish character among the police early on in the tale. While the character occurs only in passing, it makes its point: Jews are good guys, and deeply integrated into British institutions. It is a welcome contrast to the anti-Semitic portrayals that are all too common in British popular fiction of its era - see, for example, the dreadful Henry Wade.

 

While The Box Office Murders concerns a crime scheme, it has little to do with the Rogue literature of the previous generation. Rogue stories tend to focus tightly on the personalities of their crooks, with especial emphasis on their cleverness, their tweaking the nose of authority, etc. Crofts, in contrast, focuses on the crime scheme itself, and its technological and organizational features. The class element that is so important in Rogue stories is also altered here. Rogue stories tend to have lower class crooks who take on the clothes and personas of upper class members. Crofts' characters instead are explicitly identified by him as members of the lower middle classes. Inspector French himself seems petit bourgeois, and the story is one of the most relentlessly and unusually middle class of all Golden Age novels. The criminals seem in fact like tradesmen or small businessmen, and French at one point compares them to "industry in the British Isles", a memorable and apt comparison.

 

French is somewhat better characterized here than in his debut novel, the dreary, and unfortunately titled, Inspector French's Greatest Case (1924). Here, at least, he comes across as extremely tenacious, emotionally involved in his work, ingenious at coming up with schemes for detection, and somewhat slippery in his dealings with the public. One thing seems odd: while the bad guys seem to have great technical and engineering resources, the police seem to have none. At one point, French explicitly yearns for the skills of a Dr. Thorndyke. Well, why couldn't he get them? It seems amazing, but Crofts' novel suggests that in 1929, Scotland Yard seems to still have nothing resembling a police laboratory, or any scientists it can turn to for help in its investigations. The police in the book do have great organizational skills, just like the criminals, but they are completely lacking their scientific expertise. This leads to a serious imbalance in the story. Only the crooks in the novel get the benefit of Crofts' technological imagination. Because this is the heart of the tale, in some ways the crooks come across as the real protagonists of the story.

 

Mike Grost

Comments (1)

Richard Wells said

at 5:48 am on Apr 15, 2014

An original, intriguing, and at times exciting book, which I have much enjoyed.

I agree with most of what Mike has written, but can't identify a Jewish policeman in this story.

The Forensic Science Laboratory, serving the Metropolitan Police and some other forces, was established in 1934.

Richard Wells

You don't have permission to comment on this page.