A review of The Pit-Prop Syndicate by Freeman Wills Crofts

At his best, Freeman Wills Crofts can be a bit of a challenge, but this early effort, originally published in 1922, is enough to try the patience of even his most fervent advocate. It falls distinctly into two uneven parts, both in terms of length, interest, and quality. The first half, entitled The Amateurs, is so dated to modern eyes that it is almost unreadable and is written in a Boys Own Paper, gung-ho British adventurer style. The second part, The Professionals, is a more conventional, and more satisfying, police procedural.

One of our amateur protagonists, Seymour Merriman, is on a motoring holiday in Bordeaux, runs out of petrol, and gets a lift to a nearby wood mill that produces pit-props. Two things happen to him that shape the rest of the story. He spots a driver of a lorry change its number in suspicious circumstances and he espies the factory manager’s daughter, Madelaine, with whom, astonishingly, he falls in love.

On his return to Blighty, Merriman interests his friend, Claud Hilliard, who happens to be a Customs man, in the goings-on in the wood outside Bordeaux. Hilliard is immediately suspicious, thinking that there may some form of liquor smuggling racket going on, the discovery of which would boost his career aspirations no end. Hilliard immediately proposes a sailing trip to France, as you do, to take a closer look at the pit-prop factory. Merriman agrees, anxious to see his beloved again and, if Hilliard’s suspicions are well-founded, to rescue her from danger.

The duo’s adventures in Bordeaux border on high farce with them staking out the joint for days on end, secreted in a cask into which they have bored two eye holes. They are convinced that something fishy is going on and that Madelaine’s father is a reluctant participant. However, they are far from certain what the pit-prop business is a front for, perhaps smuggling spirits or counterfeit notes, but they do trace the English side of the operations to Ferriby where they also carry out some inconclusive investigations. It is the murder of Madelaine’s father in a London cab that persuades Merriman to take what would have been the obvious course of action, to alert the police, and brings Inspector George Willis into the story.

Willis, too, has fun trying to crack the gang’s operations, staking out the Ferriby factory and engaging in a bit of wiretapping. Although he is more professional and structured in his approach, he finds his opponents are slippery and manages to fall into their traps with monotonous regularity. Oddly, the murder is solved in a matter of pages, the culprit having obligingly left a clear set of dabs on the connecting phone in the cab and is really a minor sideshow in what is a mystery about how a pit-prop syndicate can find it economically viable to send their goods one way without a return cargo.

Eventually Willis cracks the gang’s mildly ingenious modus operandi, all the culprits are arrested and, naturally, Merriman wins his girl.

Some of the characteristics that make Crofts’ novels so distinctive are already in evidence. There is a well-considered scheme, ingenious in its construction, there is an endless obsession with modes of transport and the minutiae of timetables and the precise speeds that would need to be travelled to get from A to B in a given time. It is not enough for Crofts to put his character on a train. The reader is told which train and even where it might stop. Willis, in a rush, frets whether the car will be capable of maintaining an average speed of 30 mph, a bit of an eye-opener for the modern reader.

However, what does for this book is that it is overly long, very dated, and utterly dull. It might have worked as a short story or even a novella, but much of what Merriman and Hilliard do really does not move the story on and could have been excised with little impact on the integrity of the story.

Sadly, there are better ways of spending an evening than with this, not least with a glass of brandy!