posted on 30 Jan 2023

The Cask by Freeman Wills Croft

First published in 1920, The Cask is Freeman Wills Crofts debut novel and generally thought to be his masterpiece. Aficionados of the crime genre think so highly of it that it’s often given the accolade of being the foundation stone for what has become known as The Golden Age of Crime Fiction – a period of roughly 20 years between 1920 and 1940 in which the likes of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers developed a wide, enthusiastic audience. 

I picked up a reprint copy of The Cask in a delightful hardback with a reproduction vintage jacket which was released by Collins in 2016 as a Detective Story Club Classic. I’m not usually a great reader of current detective fiction but I do like to occasionally kick back with a novel from the Golden Age – they’re a window on a now lost world in which the brutal reality of murder takes a backseat to the elegance of the mystery and the cunning of the detective (professional or amateur) who solves it.

At over 350 pages, The Cask is one of the longer Golden Age novels but you soon discover that this is necessary to encompass the extraordinary, forensic detail in which Crofts unfurls the mystery of the body in the cask. The story kicks off with the delivery of a shipment of fine wine from France to Southampton docks in which a renegade cask is found to be filled with sawdust, gold coins and the body of a good-looking, young woman. The case is referred to Scotland Yard where Inspector Burnley takes up the task of discovering not just who the woman in the barrel is but where she came from, why she has been killed and who did the killing.

Crofts takes us step-by-step with Burnley as he attempts to get a foothold in the case – a case that will see him having to split his time between London and Paris, where he finds himself reunited with an old friend at the Sûreté. As the detectives follow the clues and the progress of the mysterious cask, it seems on a number of occasions that the trail has gone cold – only to be reignited by a clever deduction or a piece of luck. But soon it is clear that there can only be two suspects in the case – the man to whom the cask was addressed and the woman’s husband.

At this point everything hinges on the issue of alibis. Which of the two men have a watertight alibi and can fault be found in either? At this point in the story the police bow out and the trail is taken up by a private detective hired by one of the legal teams to probe the veracity of one suspect’s whereabouts during the time of the murder.

At the end, it isn’t the police or the private investigator that comes up trumps but the legal team of the man who the police have arrested.

At this point, I was so invested in the story and the investigation that the solution came as something of an anti-climax despite the rather wicked little twist in the tail that Crofts loads in at the end. Not that this is any sort of criticism – I guess I just didn’t really want to come to the end of the story even though I could see the solution myself by this point.

I think that readers of leaner, action-centred detective thrillers might find the meticulous attention to the detail of the mystery and its solution outstays its welcome because, although the pace doesn’t flag especially, Crofts is intent on unwrapping the case logically and in an orderly way. This could be mistaken for unnecessary detail but it really isn’t – it is in fact the essence of the book and its what will keep you rivetted.

This reprint is easy enough to find on the second-hand market and will cost you well under £10 – an absolute bargain.

 

Terry Potter

January 2023