Review: Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy

Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've said in other reviews of his books that you don't read Freeman Wills Crofts for the characters. That's a little unfair; in this book, there is a decent amount of characterization. It just mostly isn't applied to the detective.

Inspector French is such an Everyman he might well have been designed as a reader self-insert character. I don't know if that was something people consciously created a century ago; whether it was or not, kudos to FWC for creating such an outstanding one.

French does have one personal characteristic that isn't completely generic, though, and it's that he's able to win people round so they want to tell him things, by being genuinely affable and taking an interest in them. He uses this ability to win friends and influence people a number of times in this volume, to progress what seems initially to be an unpromising investigation with few clues available.

A remote house on the Yorkshire moors is owned by a miser, and he, his two servants (who are a couple), and his young niece live there. The niece is invited to visit an acquaintance, and while she's away, the house burns down. Three bodies are found in it, in positions corresponding to the master's bedroom (one) and the servants' bedroom (two), and the safe, rather than containing thirty or forty thousand pounds in banknotes - the miser having been one of those Scrooge McDuck types who likes to have his money in his house so he can play with it - contains only burnt scraps of paper. Bad luck; a tragic accident.

Or is it? When a banknote turns up that was reported destroyed by the local banker, who had a list of serial numbers of the latest batch he'd sent out to the house, it rouses the banker's suspicions, and he calls in the police, who manifest in the form of Inspector French. It's several weeks since the fire, and the trail is now as cold as the ashes. French gets a sense of the village and follows up some leads, which initially get him only to dead ends. But, being French, he perseveres methodically, and there's a shocking twist and a tense action scene at the climax.

The emphasis is, as always, on the procedural investigation, but there's a better romance subplot than in the earlier Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery , and the various characters take on, if anything, more reality and solidity than in most mysteries of the time; the cleverly planned crime is also motivated believably. Solid, like French's investigative method, and recommended.

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