The Cask

Rating:
Summary: Crofts never produced anything better than this.
Review: Casks are being unloaded from a ship's hold. They are hoisted and swung out in lots of four, fastened together by rope slings. Suddenly there is a shout. Four casks roll over out of their sling and crash back into the hold. One is found to be undamaged, wine begins oozing out from between the staves of two of them, and when the fourth is examined ....

These are the events on the opening pages of Freeman Wills Crofts' first and most famous book "The Cask". The book appeared in 1920, in the same year as Agatha Christie's first book, marking the beginning of a twenty year era known as "The Golden Age of Detective Fiction". Crofts followed its success with another 40 or so crime novels, but many authorities assert that he never produced anything better than this.

Certainly, it shows two of Crofts' great strengths: his talent as a story teller, and his ability to make time tabling and alibi checking seem fascinating. The story telling here has a whiff of the grandness and plot perfection of Wilkie Collins' "The Moonstone". A remarkable performance from beginning to end. It was to be another five years, however, before he introduced his Detective Inspector French, and some time before he began putting his expertise as a railway engineer to good use in his novels.

Frequently reprinted, it now forms part of a complete reprint edition of Freeman Wills Crofts' detective fiction works produced in 2000 by the English publishers, the House of Stratus.

Rating:
Summary: Crofts never produced anything better than this.
Review: Casks are being unloaded from a ship's hold. They are hoisted and swung out in lots of four, fastened together by rope slings. Suddenly there is a shout. Four casks roll over out of their sling and crash back into the hold. One is found to be undamaged, wine begins oozing out from between the staves of two of them, and when the fourth is examined ....

These are the events on the opening pages of Freeman Wills Crofts' first and most famous book "The Cask". The book appeared in 1920, in the same year as Agatha Christie's first book, marking the beginning of a twenty year era known as "The Golden Age of Detective Fiction". Crofts followed its success with another 40 or so crime novels, but many authorities assert that he never produced anything better than this.

Certainly, it shows two of Crofts' great strengths: his talent as a story teller, and his ability to make time tabling and alibi checking seem fascinating. The story telling here has a whiff of the grandness and plot perfection of Wilkie Collins' "TheMoonstone". A remarkable performance from beginning to end. It was to be another five years, however, before he introduced his Detective Inspector French, and some time before he began putting his expertise as a railway engineer to good use in his novels.

Frequently reprinted, it now forms part of a complete reprint edition of Freeman Wills Crofts' detective fiction works produced in 2000 by the English publishers, the House of Stratus.

Rating:
Summary: Just too many flaws
Review: Often listed among the classics of the "golden age" mysteries, the novel has too many flaws to be put alongside, say, Austin Freeman's "The Eye of Osiris" or "The Big Bow Mystery" by Israel Zangwill or "The Nine Tailors" by Dorothy Sayers.

"The Cask" is a rather lengthy police procedural, told through the eyes of several characters, principally detectives from Scotland Yard and Surete and a private detective hired by defense lawyers. Police procedurals can be fascinating, owing to the fine tuned details that seem to lend a certain reality, but they can also become cumbersome with all the interviews and reports that go no where. "The Cask" gets just a little out of hand as one detective repeats the work of another, without moving the plot forward.

In real life, murderers are not nearly so clever in their planning as we see here, especially when the crime (strangulation) was not pre-meditated. Nor are detectives as clever or lucky as the private eye who solves this case by breaking down an alibi, piece by piece, in most unlikely fashion.

Ultimately the author stacks the cards a bit too carefully, a bit too obviously. Moreover, it's one thing to "prove" a case for the sake of a novel reader and quite another to make a case that can be taken to court for a conviction by a jury. The case here would never stand up to rigorous cross examination by a competent defense attorney. This is, of course, too often the case in mystery novels, past and present. Crofts solves that little problem by having the murderer confess in detail for the reader and then commit suicide, a most unsatisfactory and dishonest way out of the problem. The device was used again and again in "golden age" mysteries and is still seen today.

Crofts' characters are well drawn and seem real enough. The atmosphere of London and Paris is excellent. The problems lie in the shifting narration, the over-plotting, and the vexacious ending. Crofts did much better and more controlled work in subsequent novels, leading me to wonder why this is considered his best by some reviewers.