First, a little background. This is by Freeman Wills Crofts (1879-1957), who is not to be confused with fellow mystery writer R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943), who wrote As a Thief in the Night, and -- according to the always knowledgeable Mike Grost -- influenced the development of Crofts's work.

The Cask, a debut novel, was published in 1920, but is set before World War I in 1912.

I'd never heard of Crofts before I found him mentioned in Dorothy L. Sayers' Five Red Herrings, but Grost tells us he influenced authors ranging from Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler to Seicho Matsumoto.

You can see why, because this is a rip-roaring, rollicking read.

A cask turns up with a shipment of wine at a London dock, and is discovered to contain a body... Then it disappears. The London police, with Inspector Burnley in charge, eventually track it down. But the cask is French-made, and the body is that of a Frenchwoman, Annette Boirac, so now Burnley has to work in tandem with his Paris counterpart, M. Lefarge ("a tall, clean-shaven, rather English looking man"), and we follow our detectives' investigations on both sides of the Channel. But then we get word of another cask. And, it seems, a third! Plus a tangle of journeyings even more inextricable than your headphone leads manage to achieve when you've left them alone for five minutes.

We really only have two suspects, both of them French (because Crofts subscribes to the idea of "fair play", you can be pretty confident no-one is going to come out of the woodwork at the last minute). So, there's Leon Felix, the former suitor of the dead woman, and Raoul Boirac, her husband. One of them is arrested; the other has an apparently rock-solid alibi. Entrusted by the detained man's legal team with the task of breaking this alibi is Georges La Touche, who is half-French and half-English, and "the smartest private detective in London".


A tale of two cities

I had three criticisms. Firstly, I found it slightly odd that we swap investigators half-way through... Mr La Touche is very engaging, but we were getting on so well with the Burnley-Lefarge duo... Is the point here that it's easier to unearth the truth when you are actually partisan (in this case, trying to save your detained client's life)? Secondly, the last scene seemed yet another illustration of the temptation to indulge in over-dramatic finales to which even otherwise sober mystery writers seem always susceptible. And, thirdly, the narrative tumbles to its end all in a rush. After the leisurely pace of the novel, this is a bit disconcerting.

Nevertheless, I found it an engrossing story, and I liked the detailed, precise style Crofts uses to tell it.

Grost notes four notable features of The Cask: Its codification of the police "procedural"; its use of a documentary-like background scenario (in this case the shipping business); the meticulous unravelling of the much-travelled cask or casks; and the cracking of the alibi.

This last became Crofts's trademark. The alibis in this book and the next "do not depend on that popular staple of the Realist school, 'the breakdown of identity'. In other words, they do not depend on impersonation, multiple identities, mistaken identifications, or other manipulations of identity to create an alibi." Instead, the puzzle of the alibi centres "on 'location and technology': the ability of modern technology to do unusual things with the location of people".

Technology? Well, the telephone comes into things fairly frequently. We learn, crucially: "The telephone operator always mentions the name of the calling town in inter-urban calls... 'Calais wants you'"; and we learn that such calls are logged. Plus, "wires" are mentioned; a typewriter plays a key role; and in a league of their own are the railways of the day.


French trains, 70 years later

I do love a mystery with lots of railway timetables... And reading this, you can't help but feel that we regressed mightily in this area over the course of the century, and are only just beginning (in some places at least) to get our act back together.

Examples:

"At 9.00 AM next morning the Continental express moved slowly out of Charing Cross station... They made a good run to Paris, stopping only at Amiens, and at 5.45 precisely drew slowly into the vast, echoing vault of the Gare du Nord...

"Clifford got out his Continental Bradshaw. To have been in Paris at the time named, a Londoner must have left by the 9.00 AM from Charing Cross on Thursday...

"Could a man who was in London at 11.00 in the morning be in Brussels at 11.00 the same evening? La Touche got his Continental Bradshaw..." Of course he did. How could anyone survive without one? And, of course, the answer is yes.

Given this degree of interest in what trains can do, it's not surprising to learn that Crofts was for many years a railway engineer.

More generally, there are many echoes of the age. References to "a street arab" or "a girl stenographer" are not great, of course, but there aren't many of those, compared with other contemporary work. Instead, we get to enjoy expressions like "By Jehoshaphat!" and "Look here, old man..." At one point a letter seems to indicate "that Felix was no better than he might be" -- I don't think I've ever heard that turn of phrase applied to men before. And the motor car is evidently making its presence felt, despite the multiplicity of carters in the story. Burnley reflects, for example, on his love of "the sights of the pavement, the sound of pneus upon asphalt, the very smell of burnt petrol..."

And Arthur Conan Doyle is very much in the air... Fairly early on, we meet John Walker, an ambitious constable, who has latched on to Doyle's sleuthing tactics: "He had read Conan Doyle, Austin Freeman, and other masters of detective fiction, and their tales had stimulated his imagination... He had made a habit of noting the appearance of the people he saw and trying to deduce their histories and, if he did not succeed in this so well as Sherlock Holmes, he hoped he would some day." Later, when La Touche manages to elicit some information via a slight deviation from the truth, he explains it away to his interlocutor by referring to a phenomenon that Doyle also believed in: "It is curious..., almost like one of those extraordinary cases of thought transference you read of."



It's interesting, too, to witness the police procedure of the day. Officers routinely reward people for information. Perhaps this is why the working classes are so helpful and deferential... The police also advertise for information, with results that are often comedic: "White-haired carters turned up at the Hotel d'Arles literally in dozens, till the management threatened an ejectment and talked of a claim for fresh carpets."

Overall, good entertainment. And of course, the webs of this early detective fiction grow ever denser. That biography I referred to ends by remarking that the success of Crofts's "meticulously researched, good-humoured, and extremely readable detective stories... was such that in the 1930s he was recognised as one of the ‘Big Three’ (with Agatha Christie and E.C. Bentley)".

E.C. Bentley...?? Watch this space...