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Born in Dublin in 1879, Freeman Wills Crofts would go on to become one of Britain’s best loved writers of detective fiction. After leaving school, Crofts joined the Belfast and North Counties Railway, rising to Chief Assistant Engineer. In 1912 he married and, in his early 30s, wrote a novel during a long period of convalescence. In homage to Charles Dickens, this first attempt was entitled A Mystery of Two Cities but by the time it was published in June 1920, by Collins, it had been retitled The Cask after a rewrite that saw the final section of the novel, largely comprising a trial, excised altogether.

Fired by this success, Crofts wrote a second novel, The Ponson Case. And then a third … For his fifth novel, Inspector French’s Greatest Case, he created Joseph French, the Scotland Yard detective who would go on to appear in a total of thirty novels, countless radio plays and three stage plays. As Crofts described him, ‘Soapy Joe [is] an ordinary man, carrying out his work, in an ordinary way … He makes mistakes but goes ahead in spite of them.’

More books followed and Crofts was soon recognised as one of the best practitioners in the genre. The railway engineer and part-time organist and choirmaster retired in 1929 to take up writing full time, and in 1930 Crofts was invited by Anthony Berkeley to become a founding member of the Detection Club, based in London. Partly because of this, Crofts and his wife Mary moved to Blackheath, a pretty village in Surrey where their first home was a house, Wildern, which has since been re-named after its most famous owner. Over the next twenty years Crofts would produce many books including The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933), Crime at Guildford (1935) and The Affair at Little Wokeham (1943), all of which are set in Surrey.

An active member of the Detection Club, Crofts also contributed to several of their collaborative ventures, including the 1931 novel The Floating Admiral, which he wrote together with Agatha Christie and other members of the Detection Club. During the Second World War, Crofts produced dozens of radio plays for the BBC, many of which he later turned into short stories for the Inspector French collection Murderers Make Mistakes (1947). Throughout the war and in the years immediately afterwards, Crofts continued to write but his output gradually declined and he died in 1957 after a stubborn battle with cancer.

Croft’s obituarist in The Times praised the writer for his ‘logically contrived’ plots and his close attention to detail, especially in the construction and breaking down of superficially cast-iron alibis. Crofts’ novels often feature railway travel and the alibis of his criminals often turn on the complexities of pre-internet timetabling. His shorter fiction is similarly precise with the majority turning on what he would style ‘the usual tiny oversight’ or an inconsistency in a suspect’s statement so that they offer the reader an opportunity to outwit the criminal before French.

Sixty years after his death, the work of Freeman Wills Crofts is having something of a resurgence. Several of his novels are once again in print and a celebratory collection is in preparation bringing together previously uncollected short stories and some of his unpublished stage and radio plays.

‘Dark Waters’ was first published in the London Evening Standard on 21 September 1953.