George Bellairs, The
Dead Shall Be Raised
British Library Crime Classics 2016 reprint of 1942 Original
© 1942, 2016 George Bellairs
ISBN 978-0=7123-5652-7
Freeman Wills Crofts, Mystery in the
Channel
British Library Crime Classics 2016 reprint of 1931 Original
© Estate of Freeman Wills Crofts 2016
ISBN 978-0-7123-5651-0
I periodically buy a batch of British Library Crime Classics
reprints of “golden age” British mystery writers, and these two are from the
most recent batch. In his introduction
to The Dead Shall Be Raised, Martin
Edwards refers to Bellairs’ “quiet wit” and to the “brisk pace” of the
book. This is the second mystery
featuring Inspector Thomas Littlejohn, and Edwards comments on Bellairs’
overall approach to his task as author:
The murder mystery
plots are competently put together, but Bellairs was not aiming to write complex
puzzles of the kind so fashionable during “the Golden Age of Murder” between
the two world wars. At a time of
national crisis, he concentrated on producing mysteries that would distract his
readers from the horrors or war; his books are as notable for their humor and
humanity as they are for their plots…his harshest words are reserved for people
who exploit others. His brisk
characterisations suggest an acute observer of human nature.
Bellairs would produce 59 books, in which 54 of which
Littlejohn is the main character, during a 39 year career (1941-1980) which
Edwards characterizes as that of “a ‘mid-list’ writer of the mid-twentieth
century, an author who was never a best-seller, but who for half a lifetime
worked to entertain his reader.”
Freeman Wills Crofts, on the other hand, was very definitely
a best-selling author (at least among writers of mystery fiction. Mystery in the Channel’s detective is
Inspector Joseph French, who appears in 32 books between 1925 and 1957 (and Crofts also wrote 9
non-series books). Mystery in the Channel is the 7th Inspector French
book. Of Crofts, Martin writes (in the
introduction to this reprint)
Detective stories written
during “the Golden Age of Murder” between the two world wars have long been
stereotypes…as dry intellectual puzzles which paid little heed to the real
world. The truth is rather different,
and is more complicated and interesting.
Crofts’ work is a case in point.
As a writer, he seldom indulged in literary flourishes, and this helps
to explain why his books have often been dismissed as ‘humdrum’…his practical turn
of mind proved invaluable when it came to creating ingenious murder mysteries—and
describing how patient detective work could solve them.
It’s probably unfair to compare these two books, as they
differ in setting, in the issues that arise in pursuit of a solution to the
mysteries, and in the contemporary and retrospective standing of their
authors. But having read them
back-to-back, I obviously did find myself making comparisons.
In The Dead Shall Be
Raised, we begin with a startling discovery in 1941—a man’s body and a
shotgun are uncovered by workmen. The
body is that of Enoch Sykes, who disappeared in 1917, at the time the dead body
of his close friend (and rival for the affections of a young woman), Jerry
Trickett was discovered on the moor. The
assumption was, obviously, that Sykes had shot Trickett in jealous rage (both
men were shown at the inquest to have been drunk) and then fled the scene. The likeliest outcome was believed to be that
Sykes enlisted, and was subsequently killed, in the Great War. Now, it’s obvious that there are problems
with that scenario.
By happenstance, Scotland Yard’s Thomas Littlejohn has come
for a weekend visit (in the west England town in which the story is set) with
his wife, who has been evacuated from London for the time being. He is quickly co-opted into the
investigation. There are obvious
difficulties in re-opening an investigation nearly a quarter of a century later—people
have died, or moved away; those still alive and on the scene may have forgotten
much of what happened. But Littlejohn
and the local Superintendent (Haworth) plunge ahead. Oddly, almost everyone is still alive
and they all seem to have very clear memories of the events.
The investigation is well-handled, although some of the
interviews seem to me to be perfunctory.
And, given the importance of both of the dead men’s employment (they
were co-workers in what is described as a “foundry”), their workplaces are only
sketchily (and inadequately) described—they are more pieces of background about
which the author was not well-informed, and which he did not bother to inform
himself about. The solution to the
mystery comes by way of two separate confessions, neither of which, to my mind,
seem particularly plausible or in character.
Both of the people who make confessions conveniently die of heart
attacks, sparing us of the need to have a trial.
So it was a good setup handled only adequately. Added to that was what was (for me, and I
think this would generally be true for readers today) way too much use of
dialect (and variant phonetic spellings designed to mark people’s speech as
dialect). I could see this as a decent
early work by an author who would need to make progress to be able to continue—but
if this was the standard of his work, then his actual lengthy career would be,
for me, a surprise.
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Crofts’ tale is very different, and very differently
handled. A yacht is found adrift (by the
crew of a passenger boat) between England and France (near Folkstone), with two
bodies and an indication—from bloodstains—of a third person having been on board. We rapidly discover that the two dead men are
the lead partners in a London banking firm, and that the firm is facing
insolvency (given that the story is set in 1930, this would strike readers of
the book as all too plausible). Apparently ₤1.5 million is missing (think of that as about $60 million today). The
local police turn the case over to Scotland Yard as quickly as possible, both
because the bodies were found, and murders almost certainly occurred—outside the
territory of the locals, and because the background to, and motive for, the
murders is most likely to be found in London.
Crofts handles the financial aspects of the case fairly
adroitly; he clearly took pains to understand how a privately owned
(partnership) financial house would operate; how bank notes were circulated and
handled [banks, for example, made a note of the serial numbers of “large”
bills--₤5, ₤10, ₤20, ₤100 notes—the “equivalent values” of those today would have
been $200 (for the ₤5 note) to $4,000 (for the ₤100 note), and both who “paid”
those bank notes into the bank and to
whom they were “paid out.”] Inspector
French conducts thorough interrogations of all the parties involved, and his
interactions with other officers at Scotland Yard, and with his superiors, are
well handled. And the investigation
keeps running into what appear to be dead ends.
But French persists, and we are kept privy to almost all his thoughts. The denouement seemed a bit forced—not the
solution, but the events surrounding the arrest of the guilty party.
Crofts is not s flashy writer—no bursts of eloquence or insight
into human nature (as one might get from Hammett or Chandler); no action-filled
scenes or chases—but he does what he does quite well—he tells the story of a
professional police detective methodically investigating a very tangled set of
events. And, for my tastes, there’s more
subtle humor in Crofts’ writing than in Bellairs’. It is, in the end, fairly clear to me why one
of these authors is still regarded as a major figure in the genre, and the
other one is, well, not.
