[Haycraft is an American editor and critic specializing in mystery fiction. In the following excerpt, he provides an overview of Crofts's best novels.]

The first of modern writers to find fictional possibilities in the step-by-step methods of actual police routine was Freeman Wills Crofts. In the opinion of a vast number of readers and critics he has never been equaled, much less surpassed, in his particular field. The son of a doctor in the British Army, Mr. Crofts was born in Dublin and lived a great part of his life in Northem Ireland. Educated at the Methodist and Campbell Colleges, Belfast, at seventeen he entered on his professional career as a civil and railway engineer, a vocation which contributed no little to his later almost mathematical detective plots. The first of these, however, had to await the author's fortieth year.

"In 1916," he writes, "I had a long illness, with a slow recovery, and to while away the time I got pencil and exercise book and began to amuse myself by writing a story. It proved a splendid pastime and I did a lot of it before getting about again. Then I put it away, never dreaming that it would see the light of day, but a little later I re-read it, thought that something might be made of it, and began to alter and revise. Eventually… to my immense delight it was published."

This story, as every devotee knows by now, was that masterpiece of practical crime detection, The Cask (1920). Mr. Crofts will presumably not object if one hazards the statement that not even he has succeeded in topping this well-nigh perfect example of its kind. In its quietly documented thoroughness, it is one of those timeless stories that improve rather than lose by the test of re-reading—preferably with pocket-atlases and maps of pre-Hitler London and Paris by the reader's side. Its central theme has become the trade-mark of Mr. Crofts' work in the field: the painstaking demolition of the "unbreakable" alibi. In fact, it has become almost a truism that the one character in a Crofts' story who could not possibly have committed the crime will in the end be shown to have done just that!

If The Cask has a flaw, it is its failure to introduce Inspector French, the modest, believable police hero of most of the author's later works. This difficulty was remedied, however, with the appearance of Inspector French's Greatest Case (1924), a volume worthy in almost every way to find its place on the shelf beside The Cask. Unfortunately, not so much can be said of quite all the later Crofts books, for in recent years some impatient readers claim to have noticed evidences of weariness in the methodical Inspector's adventurings. Others feel that his narrator occasionally becomes too greatly preoccupied with time-tables and menus to serve the best interests of fiction. These complaints, one fears, are at one and the same time justified and inherent in the factual method when it gets out of hand. The detective story may not be an "art form," but in common with all fiction it partakes of the axiom that art can reproduce life only by being selective.

That Mr. Crofts carries his chosen method sometimes a little too far is regrettable but by no means fatal to the enjoyment of any of his numerous works, even the least of which are rewarding to the reader who is willing to meet the author half-way with time and attention. Certainly, fellow-practitioners and readers alike owe him a very considerable debt for his conscientious pioneering in the early 1920's, and for his contribution of several of the most enduring stories in the genre. It is a pleasure to record that this contribution has not gone unrewarded. The Cask has sold more than 100,000 copies in two decades, with Inspector French's Greatest Case only a little behind, and Mr. Crofts' more-than-a-score of works have been translated into at least ten languages. In 1929 he was able to retire from engineering and in 1939 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. At latest reports he and his wife were living quietly in the Guildford region of Surrey, which has served as the locale of several of his stories.

Whatever he may or may not produce in the future, Freeman Wills Crofts' permanent place in the history of detective fiction is already more than secure.

Howard Haycraft, "England: 1918-1930 (The Golden Age)," in his Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1941, pp. 112-58.