Got some Freeman Wills Crofts mysteries at the library! -- Garbo

Freeman Wills Crofts was born and schooled in Ireland, though his detective, Inspector French, worked for Scotland Yard. Crofts wrote a number of train-related mysteries, which in itself is no mystery as the author worked for the railway system as a civil engineer until he retired to write full-time. 

This post is more about finding the books at the library than it is about Crofts' life or literary output, but I have included a couple of YouTube videos about Crofts and his work at the bottom of this post. 

      

I looked at the copyright pages of the library copies of Crofts' novels, to see their publication history. The Cask was published in England in 1920 by William Collins, Sons, a Scottish publishing house which merged in 1990 with Harper & Row to become HarperCollins.  The Cask was reprinted twice (in 1924 and 1936) by Dodd  Mead. The copy I borrowed came out from Dover in 1977; in the above photo of the group of library books with the two Red Badge Detective  covers showing, we see just the spine of The Cask. The front cover has a big interlibrary loan sticker on it, but you can see the original artwork in the image at the top of this post.

 The Croft mystery Enemy Unseen, like the reprint of The Cask, was published by Dodd Mead, in 1945. Fear Comes to Chalfont has the same Red Badge Detective imprint  on the cover board as Enemy Unseen, and it came out from Dodd Mead three years earlier, in 1942. Both books include a writing contest announcement across from the title page. This was of interest to me as I have some planned future posts about short story contests from the 1920s to the 1950s.

12.30 From Croytdon was published in 1934 by Hodder & Stoughton (now part of Hachette) and reprinted by Poisoned Pen Press, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2016.  The reprint of Antidote to Venom, came out in the previous year from Poisoned Pen, with an original publication date of 1938. Poisoned Pen Press worked with the British Library to come out with these softcover reprints. The second of the two videos at the end of the post is specifically about these editions.

My vision problems send me to audiobooks, and the AI readers for Kindle audio are much less robot-like than they used to be. I got this Omnibus of some of Crofts' best work for 99 cents. 

As promised, here are a couple of online videos about Crofts and his prolific pen: 

There is nothing like a good ol' YouTube book review video from an actual bookstore.

I like the retro Alistair Cooke approach to this video, though the reviewer reminds me more of Ted Danson in "The Good Place."

 

Next week:  Some cool cover art from assorted Freeman Wills Crofts mysteries!