Review: Inspector French's Greatest Case

Inspector French's Greatest Case by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inspector French starred in a number of books, of which I read the second one ( Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery ) first. They are completely self-contained, and I didn't feel that reading them out of order made any difference.

These are early police procedurals, written by an engineer, with all the thoroughness and rigour that implies. These days, people who write police procedurals usually make the investigating officer quirky or eccentric in some way and often have some interpersonal dynamics going on as well, so that it's not just working through a series of investigative procedures, but that isn't how these are written. Since reading this one but before reviewing it, I've read another one and a half books by the same author, and although the inspectors are not Inspector French, they might as well be; they're interchangeable bland Everymen, and any personal relationships they have are entirely generic. If there's a romance subplot, it's at about the usual level for a male author of the time: very little on-screen time is devoted to developing it, so the courtship takes place over a short time period and the female love interest never gets to exhibit much personality. This book doesn't actually have such a subplot, though the second in the series does, and so does The Pit-Prop Syndicate .

What this author does, then, to hold the reader's interest, is to make the mystery itself so mysterious and intriguing that you want to see it solved, and also throw in some adventure or thriller elements. In this case, there are missing diamonds, disguises, false identities, a profusion of red herrings, and chases around Europe. It's entertaining and compelling at that level, so I hardly missed the characterization and relationship development that you'd get in a more modern book of this type. This author's criminals always seem to be highly intelligent and good planners, just not quite good enough to evade the detectives, and that makes for a pleasing mystery.

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