Mysteries Ahoy!

I have been on something of a good run with Freeman Wills Crofts’ work but all good things must come to an end. As much as I had hoped to enjoy Found Floating, I have to say it is the first story of his that I would classify as a flop in spite of it containing a few interesting points.

The novel begins by outlining the tense relationships within the Carrington household and helping us to understand their origins. The head of the household is William Carrington who had been the head of a successful works before unexpectedly retiring on grounds of ill-health.

It might have been expected that William would appoint his nephew Jim to replace him as he had been employed at the firm as his deputy for some years but he surprises everyone by cabling to Australia to summon his eldest brother’s son, Mant. This causes considerable resentment and creates a palpable sense of tension at family gatherings.

The first third of the book details the strange events of William’s birthday party during which an attempted poisoning occurs. The second sees the family deciding to take a lengthy cruise during which a murder takes place with the final hundred pages being devoted to Inspector French’s investigation.

While I said that I regard the book as a whole to be a flop, the first hundred pages are actually pretty promising. The circumstances of the poisoning are intriguing and I think those who appreciate Crofts’ style of methodical, deductive investigations will appreciate the way the circumstances of the crime are pieced together even if we are offered no solutions at this point in the tale.

Things begin to fall apart in the second section of the novel as the family board the cruise ship and embark on their journey around the Mediterranean. I can best describe this part of the novel as being like being invited around to a friend’s house for dinner to be regaled with a lengthy side-show of photos from their most recent holiday (not to mention the enthusiastic explanation of how the ship is powered which takes up a whole chapter).

As much as I usually enjoy Crofts’ writing, I do not regard him as being a particularly sensual writer. He is great with the technical details of a crime but he is not suited to describing the sights and sounds of foreign travel and so instead we get sequences of destinations, details about the dining arrangements and the sleeping arrangements in the cabins. It is all of the tedium of travel without any of the exoticism or fantasy.

All might be forgiven if the circumstances of the murder were interesting. Unfortunately even the sequence in which the body is found feels anticlimactic, happening out of the reader’s view and being reported after the fact. We are then kept waiting while the family and ship’s captain discuss the practicalities of claiming the body, making funeral arrangements and who will travel back to Gibraltar to pay their respects.

This leads us into the final third of the book, French’s investigation. While I found the lead up to the murder frustrating, there were at least some points of interest in the death itself. French has to piece together who had the opportunity to kill the victim and how it could have been done when each of the suspects seem to have solid alibis.

Unfortunately I think this is the most problematic section of the novel.

The first issue I have with it is the needless recap we get of the plot up until this point. Much of the hundred pages is made up of characters telling us things we have already been told while contributing little new to our understanding of what happened. This is frustrating but at least it does make a point of clarifying a few details and closing off some possible solutions.

The bigger problem is that French does not solve the case himself. In fact I would argue he does very little to actually bring about the novel’s conclusion at all, even if the reader may infer that he had the information necessary to work out the killer’s identity.

Instead Crofts gifts us the killer’s identity, their back story including their motivation and a detailed explanation of how it was done. It is an elaborate plot that justifies Martin Edwards’ description of it as ‘quite complicated’ and like him I did not find the passage in which all is revealed to be at all gripping although I was at least surprised by the murderer’s identity.

The problem for me is that while the killer’s explanation tidies everything up very nicely, I do not see how French would possibly have been able to deduce every element of that solution from the information he has. Too much information is gifted to the sleuth and unlike the other French stories I have read, there is little sense of him making logical deductions from the evidence. In short, even if you are a fan of French’s investigations I think you may well be underwhelmed by his efforts in this case.

If you do decide to tackle this in spite of my reservations, one thing that may keep you going is Crofts’ eccentric decision to name the novel’s romantic lead Dr. Runciman Jellicoe, a name which surely must rank amongst the most ridiculous I have ever encountered in a non-comic work. It is not written as though it is intended to be comedic yet it completely undermines any tender moments between the young couple.

Sadly any entertainment it gave me seems to have been purely accidental on the part of the author. Though Crofts has some good ideas, the book feels unbalanced and less than the sum of its parts. He has certainly written much better books than this, many of which are actually in print, so I would only recommend it to Crofts completists.