While Freeman Wills Croft may not have the reputation today of his mystery writer colleagues like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. However, he played a crucial role in the Golden Age of detective stories. We likely would not have inverted-mystery (or “whydunit”) shows like Columbo or police-procedural shows like CSI without Crofts’ contribution. He was also a devout Christian whose attempts to fit his stories with his faith created interesting questions that we continue to wrestle with today.
The way he sought to combine writing with faith may be especially useful today, when, as C.S. Lewis suggested in his essay “Christian Apologetics,” “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.”
So what kind of mysteries did Crofts write, and how can we learn from his approach to Christian writing?
How Did Freeman Wills Crofts Start His Writing Career?
Crofts was born in 1879 in Dublin, Ireland. His father was a British Army surgeon-lieutenant who died from fever in Honduras before Crofts was born. When Crofts was three years old, his mother married Jonathon Harding, an Anglican minister in Gilford, Ireland, who later served as Archdeacon of Drumore from 1895 to 1905. Curtis Evans notes in his book Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery that having a priest for a stepfather is key to understanding Crofts’ life: faith became one of his defining passions.
Not much is known about what books Crofts read as a child. However, Evans notes a possible clue. Crofts’ novel The Box Office Murders includes a character finding books piled in a criminal’s house, including The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan and The Fairchild Family by Mary Martha Sherwood. Evans explains that the second book is a didactic nineteenth-century children’s book about a family learning they need God. If it’s the sort of book Crofts read growing up, it may help explain his didactic approach to Christian writing)
After being schooled in Belfast, Croft’s uncle, railway engineer Berkely Deane Wise, took him on as an apprentice at the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway in 1897. The next roughly 20 years were spent working in railways, with Crofts becoming the company’s Chief Assistant Engineer. He married Mary Bellas Canning, daughter of Coleraine bank manager John C. Canning, in 1912.
In 1916, illness led him to take time off work, and he spent the sick leave writing his first novel, The Cask. The story opens with a shipment of French wine arriving at St. Katherin’s Docks in London with one cask accidentally broken. Sailors see a body inside the cask and notify the police. Inspector Burnley comes to the docks to investigate… but the cask has disappeared. The rest of the story follows Burnley’s chase to locate the mysterious cask, using clues like railway and boat schedules to determine where it originally came from… and which suspect had the opportunity to hide something.
Crofts didn’t publish The Cask until 1920, but it became a sensation when it appeared. It remains famous today—many scholars consider it one of the first police-procedural novels.
As Evans points out, The Cask was also published at an ideal time—the same year as Agatha Christie’s debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The two authors became connected about a decade later when they both joined a new group of mystery authors: the Detection Club. By the time Crofts joined in 1930, he had retired from railway engineering to focus on writing. He went on to write nearly a novel per year until he died, as well as dozens of short stories and several stage and BBC radio plays.
What Made Freeman Wills Crofts a Golden Age Detective Writer?
While Croft couldn’t have known it when he started writing, the 1920s-1930s were the perfect time to write detective stories.
Historians generally say that Edgar Allan Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841. Various people followed his example, most famously Arthur Conan Doyle, with his Sherlock Holmes stories.
However, the detective story became highly popular between World War I and World War II. Detectives like Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Gideon Fell sold to millions. Many of these writers referenced each other’s work in their stories. For example, Sayers’ novel The Five Red Herrings references Crofts’ novels.
Faith informed the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in several ways. W.H. Auden argued that detective stories are about wanting to be restored to “the Garden of Eden, a state of innocence.” Other writers, from academics like Jared Lobdell to theologians like J.I. Packer, have argued that they provide a kind of fairy tale emphasizing themes like deliverance and justice—inherently Christian themes. (look for P.D. James’ Mars Hill audio)
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction also discussed faith at a sorely needed time. Carr’s biographer, Douglas G. Greene, points out that these stories were essentially puzzles: giving clues so readers could understand the solution greatly mattered. Puzzles were both diversions for people seeking amusement after a terrible war, and since they always had a solution, they reaffirmed that life has a plan.
Not surprisingly, Crofts and some of his best-known Detection Club colleagues were religious. Sayers wrote lay theology and The Man Born to Be King, a groundbreaking play about Jesus. The Detection Club’s first president, G.K. Chesterton, wrote apologetics and the Father Brown mysteries. Catholic priest Ronald Knox translated the Bible into Latin and wrote “The Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.” Crofts wrote detective stories and The Four Gospels in One Story.
Crofts became one of the Golden Age’s most acclaimed writers, famous for his carefully constructed plots featuring technical details. He did it so well that Raymond Chandler, an American writer who complained in The Simple Art of Murder that detective stories were artificial, praised Crofts as “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy.”
However, Crofts’ struggles as a writer and his approach to including faith in his stories made his legacy more complex than his friends.
How Did Crofts Fit Christianity into His Detective Stories?
Evans shows Crofts’ beliefs played a part in his stories from the beginning. The morals are always clear, even old-fashioned—for example, several books feature remarried women fainting with shock when they learn reports were wrong and their first husbands are still alive. Evans suggests that the Jazz Age’s atmosphere informed many of Crofts’ contemporaries, while his writing was influenced more by Victorian melodrama, where social embarrassment was the worst crime.
However, the moral themes don’t seem forced in Crofts’ best work, where the plots are clever and tightly organized. Inspector French’s Greatest Case may not reference religion much, but its story emphasizes themes like justice and deliverance, which assume a Christian worldview. While secular colleagues like Carr wrote stories where the detective might let the killer escape out of some sense that “fair play” mattered more than justice, Crofts’ detectives always brought justice. In Lewis’ terms, Croft knew how to write a good mystery with Christian ideas latent—which meant he imparted Christian ideas to audiences who would have rejected a clear religious agenda.
By the 1930s, Crofts’ was trying to include more obvious Christian messages in his stories. For example, his 1938 novel Antidote to Venom has a foreword explaining it’s an experiment “to tell a story of crime positively,” meaning Crofts shows how a regular person is tempted to crime and redeemed. The story depicts a criminal agonizing over his actions, complete with Garden of Eden imagery (snake venom, the culprit working with many animals in a zoo). Ultimately, Inspector French solves the case, and the criminal repents after a religious conversion.
Even 1930s readers found this a bit overdone. A Boston Transcript reviewer sarcastically said, “We particularly enjoyed the conclusion in which everyone, in the last couple of pages, like Mary Pickford found solace in God.” Mary Pickford, often called “America’s Sweetheart,” became famous for playing innocent women who get all the right things by the movie’s end. The Aberdeen Press and Journalcommented, “May we suggest to Mr. Crofts that if his murderers are to develop an Oxford Group conscience, poor French will be out of a job, and he is far too good to be retired.”
In context, Crofts was doing something many of his friends were trying. All the Christian members of the Detection Club experimented with putting their faith into their stories—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Crofts probably found it especially difficult: reading didactic Christian books like The Fairchild Family and writing like a Victorian melodramatist make it hard to write an overtly Christian book without making it heavy-handed.
However, the comment about the “Oxford Group Conscience” highlights why Crofts’ stories featuring faith felt more like propaganda than art. Crofts was involved for years with the Oxford Group, later renamed the Moral Re-Armament group, which aimed to spread moral teaching after World War I. Crofts tried to get Sayers involved in the group, but she responded that she had concerns about its approach.
While Crofts and his Oxford Group friends were well-intentioned, it’s hard to escape the sense that they fell into a classic trap: so interested in changing the world for God that they forgot to consult him. Seeking to improve people’s lives is part of the gospel message, but we remember that God alone decides the future. Our actions matter, but we don’t ultimately do good things to bring heaven to earth; we do them to honor God—who also commands us to seek spiritual maturity and worship him well by honing the talents he gives us.
So, Crofts’ key struggle was one that many Christian writers face today: he wanted to impact people with his fiction but thought that meant making his beliefs as explicit as possible. Ironically, many mystery novels sold in Christian bookstores are critiqued for making this mistake—and most of those writers are building on tropes that Crofts and his friends invented.
What Happened to Detective Stories After Freeman Wills Crofts?
If Crofts’ best work is so important, we may wonder why he isn’t nearly as famous today.
The simple answer is that Antidote to Venom showed he was trying, without much success, to a change in detective stories. Sayers’ friend Charles Williams wrote in a 1934 book review, “It has for some time been clear that detective tales must either change or cease.” Most Detection Club members saw that readers were losing interest in stories that were puzzles without much character development. Many responded by making their characters more detailed, even abandoning “proper detective novels.” For example, Sayers’ book Gaudy Night is often called a great novel first and a detective story second.
Writers like Crofts, who favored plots over characters, struggled by the late 1930s, and their legacies often became ignored. One later Detection Club member, Julian Symons, complained in his study Bloody Murder that Crofts and similar writers like John Rhodes were the “humdrum school” of mystery authors whose writing was too boring today.
On paper, Symons appears to have a point. Today, outside of the cozy mystery genre, most detective novels are best known for emphasizing psychology (clever characters, the villains playing mind games with the heroes) rather than for having clever plots. However, Crofts’ model had a big influence on police-procedural stories, from TV shows like CSI to thrillers like Michael Connelly’s Bosch series. There is also an argument to be made that techno-thrillers like Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October take the “humdrum” style into a new format: the same love for detailed tech, only applied to espionage instead of crime stories.
So, Crofts continues to be important and influential today in some form or another. What can Christian writers learn from his legacy today?
What Can We Learn from Freeman Wills Crofts?
We learn something important about the writer’s calling by looking at his flaws. Decades before cozy mysteries, Crofts wondered what being a Christian mystery writer meant. Rather than developing a unified theology that sees writing as being in the world but not of the world, he assumed the sacred and secular were separate—and that sacred work meant sermonizing. Crofts was at his best when he didn’t try to separate the sacred from the secular: writing intelligent mysteries with implied Christian beliefs behind them.
Crofts’ struggles also show that understanding our calling means asking tough questions when our calling doesn’t seem to work anymore. Crofts saw that the detective story market was changing and tried to write character-driven stories that fit the new trend. However, the evidence suggests he needed to go deeper. He needed to ask whether the Christian books that inspired him as a child had nuance he hadn’t seen before or whether he needed to seek new models to draw on. He needed to consider whether his Christian community equipped him to think about faith and storytelling well or if he needed to seek out additional or new Christian communities that helped him grow. When we reach a crisis, we often have to consider where we came from and what we may need to deconstruct before we can rebuild and move forward.
We can also learn a lot from Crofts’ strengths.
First, Crofts showed that Christian writers needn’t be “so heavenly minded to be no earthly good.” He was a Christian and a well-practiced expert in a hard science field. His best fiction shows how to combine Christian morality with practical knowledge. Today, that example may be especially important for Christians who seek to be good witnesses. If we live increasingly in a society where faith isn’t respected, we can open doorways to relationships by building credibility—for example, by showing it’s possible to be a Christian and wise about something down-to-earth like engineering.
Second, his work was often more complex than readers assumed. His characters may not have been as detailed as in a Poirot story, but they could have hints of complexity. For example, Kate Jackson observes that Antidote to Venom adds some nuance to the “criminals are all bad” cliché: the criminal’s struggle over his crimes makes him relatable, and the detective doesn’t enjoy arresting him. Evans highlights other nuances: Inspector French’s Greatest Case reveals the detective has a sad past (he lost a son to World War I), and several later novels use crooked financier villains to criticize capitalism gone rogue. Crofts may not have broken the genre like Sayers did in Gaudy Night. Still, in little ways, his stories show that the Golden Age writers weren’t predictable, heavy-handed moralists who always supported the establishment. Crofts could provide complexity without becoming a maverick.
We can also respect the fact that he was an innovator. While colleagues like Sayers and Christie created models that the cozy mystery genre has followed, he helped create the model that police procedural authors and inverted mystery authors use today. Whether we are talking about Christian thriller authors like Mike Nappa or mainstream mystery authors like David Baldacci, the mystery genre still has Freeman Wills Crofts’ fingerprints all over it.
Best Books by Freeman Wills Crofts
The following are 10 of Crofts’ best mystery novels, including an anthology of his short stories.
1. The Cask.
2. The Ponson Case.
3. Inspector French’s Greatest Case.
4. Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy.
5. Sir John Magill’s Last Journey.
6. The Hog’s Back Mystery.
7. Mystery on Southampton Water.
8.The Loss of the “Jane Vosper.”
9. Found Floating.
10. The 9:50 Up Express and Other Mysteries edited by Tony Medawar.
Crofts also contributed chapters to several “round-robin” books written with other detective writers: The Scoop and Behind the Screen (first published in newspapers before being collected together into a book), Double Death, The Floating Admiral, and The Anatomy of a Murder.
Readers who want to learn more about Crofts’ life can find details in Martin Edwards’ The Golden Age of Murder and Curtis Evans’ Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery.
Photo Credit: Daria Kraplak/Unsplash
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