Freeman Wills CroftsThe Cask: 100th Anniversary Edition

Ce n'est pas le genre de livre qu'on ne peut pas lâcher avant la fin ; parfois un peu ennuyeux mais il y a quand même des rebondissements.

Connection between London and Paris before the Channel train. The boat train was a drag but you got to knowother travellers and the two cities behaved in a civilized manner. This book with a multi layered plot makes it great to reflect on the timesand changes endured.

The Cask (first published in 1920) is Freeman Wills Crofts first novel - which he started writing to relieve his boredom being stuck in hospital. It is a gentle read which starts with the discovery of the titular flask and then follows the efforts of the detectives to determine how it and it's gruesome contents came to be there.There are comparatively few characters but they are nicely developed and, for the most part, amiable and likeable. There is none of the angst which seems compulsory these days. Because the cast is relatively small the number of suspects is limited so this is not really a whodunnit but Freeman Wills Crofts was the master of the seemingly unbreakable alibi and this is his very enjoyable first foray into the genre which would become his speciality.The book features an introduction written by the author himself some twenty years after the original publication. In it he comments that his later books were shorter as he discovered that he could get the same royalties for 80,000 words as the 120,000 in the Cask. Personally I found that the slightly longer format worked well and the book felt unhurried but not padded.He explains in his introduction that the original third section of the book was set during a trial but that the publishers had requested him to rewrite it. It would have been nice had the original been included for comparison but as the book already has higher page count than others in this series that may have been asking too much (assuming of course that the original survives...)The story then is in three parts - the first section takes place in London and follows genial but determined Inspector Burnley as he struggles to track down the cask and piece together what is going on. In the second section the action moves to Paris where Inspector Burnley teams up with an old friend - Inspector Lefarge - to continue his investigations. The final section takes place in both cities as the case moves towards its conclusion.For those looking for an action packed novels full of hair's breadth escapes and daring do this is not it - though there are scenes of drama and tension as the net tightens however for a beautifully written and highly readable novel which evokes the atmosphere of a gentler and less rushed time I highly recommend this both to fans of the genre and those looking to explore an early Golden Age novel.

There are multiple ways to think about this book. Often lauded as one of the first police procedurals, it is what Conrad would have called 'anxiously contemplated'. Crofts thought this through, again and again. He planned it and plotted it, again and again. The result is, by turns, very impressive, very dull and impossibly difficult to follow. Written for the sort of reader who is working along with the narrator to solve the puzzle, the novel's plot would obligate that reader to keep elaborate notes, charts and graphs to follow the endless railroad schedules which are central to the mystery.The concept is terrific. A cask putatively containing French statuary cracks open on London docks and is found to contain several dozen gold sovereigns, mountains of sawdust and the body of a young woman. The solution to the crime obligates Inspector Burnley of the Yard to travel to and from France and to and from the northern environs of London to discover the identity of the victim, the murderer and the murderer's method and motivation.Every single step of the way is charted in painful detail. While the book is 280 substantial pages it feels more like 600. The principal problem is the nearly complete absence of characterization. Watching the great British crime series, George Gently, the other evening, I checked out the subsidiary material. In one of the interviews Martin Shaw comments that the stories are hardly crime fiction at all. They are stories about people and their personal relationships. While much mainstream fiction utilizes crime fiction elements to give its stories heft and interest, all great crime fiction utilizes mainstream fiction's elements (setting, character, plot, theme) to make Novels. THE CASK has no characterization to speak of, no themes to speak of; it is all plot (in interesting but not fully-realized settings).So what is a reader to do? Read THE CASK as a historical document; see its place in the history of mystery and crime fiction.Warning: steer clear of the final pp. of the book, where everything is not only resolved but tied up in a bow so large and so generous that we feel as if we might have tumbled into fairy taledom. SPOILER: the murderer is the most obvious individual and, in some ways, the only possible individual since the mystification concerning a possible perpetrator is so obviously a distraction that the real perp is clear from the get-go. The mystery is all in the execution.One interesting tidbit for crime writers. The chapter headings evoke the world of the Saturday afternoon serial ("Lefarge Hunts Alone"; "Some Damning Evidence"; "The Unravelling of the Web") and a couple have cliffhanger endings. This is cool and fun.Warning: if you imagine an early reader, ensconced in a smoking jacket, resting in fine leather and sipping chilled, dry sherry and want to replicate the experience—you're going to need at least a case to get to the end of this story.

This is Freeman Wills Crofts' first novel, appearing in 1921. There is a charming introduction which tells how the novel came to be written and published. The introduction concedes that the story is improbable and longer than it needed to be. But it was well received and launched Crofts' career as a leading writer of detective fiction.Crofts was a railroad engineer by profession, and railroad schedules tend to play an important role in his plots. He was clearly a detail man, and his ability to catalog and manipulate the details of this case is mind boggling. I was unable to keep it all straight. Ultimately I decided it didn't matter.It's clear from the cover that he plot concerns a body in a cask. There's enough drama in this to capture the imagination. The murder happened either in France or England. So we get to observe the friendly partnership between a Scotland Yard detective and a French police detective.The story falls into two sections. First the detectives track down every piece of evidence, check alibis with meticulous care, and make an arrest. Then the defense goes to work in the hope of proving them wrong. I found the first part tedious at times, but I really liked the second part, which was more tightly written.Although The Cask is not quite as polished as Crofts' later books, it establishes his style, and fans of Golden Age Crime fiction should find it worth reading. The books in this series (Collins Crime Club Classics) are beautifully produced with vintage book jackets. They are a pleasure to hold in the hand and to own.