Mystery Monday: The 12.30 from Croydon!

Our book today is The 12.30 from Croydon, a 1934 thriller (its boring American title was Wilful and Premeditated) by Freeman Wills Crofts, who was both a member in good standing of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction and also that much rarer bird, an Irishman with absolutely no ear for telling a good story. It’s true that Raymond Chandler offered some measured praise of Crofts in his fantastic manifesto The Simple Art of Murder, and it’s true that no less an authority than Dorothy Sayers herself called The 12.30 from Croydon “an excellent book,” but both were clearly drunk at the time.

In fact, Crofts is a simply dreadful writer, and his clockwork mystery novels (many of which star his sad-sack signature character Detective French, whose quirky, memorable trait is that he … wait for it … works real hard) are exactly the kind of barely-flavored gristle that will only satisfy you if you have a full-blown addiction to mystery fiction and so will read anything that starts with a dead body and ends with a trial. I used to know one such addict, and during his final illness, when he was confined to bed but entirely mentally alert, he’d often ask me to buy him some murder mysteries at Brentano’s when I came for my daily visit. When I asked him which authors he preferred, he said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Just seize the first five you see.”

For all its faults, The 12.30 from Croydon does indeed start with a body and end with a trial. The novel’s opening sequence, in which a byplane-era crossing of the English Channel is dramatized, climaxes with the moment you just know was the real-life inspiration for the whole book: the plane lands, the passengers bestir themselves – and one of them turns out to have died en route. You can picture Crofts looking at some elderly passenger sleeping on just such a plane and thinking ‘wouldn’t that make a capital opening scene in book, if that chap were dead?”

The chap in question is Andrew Crowther, an ailing invalid taking his first airplane flight. He was a wealthy, retired Yorkshire industrialist whose business went to his nephew Charles. Unfortunately for Charles, times are tough and the business needs a large infusion of cash – which dear old uncle is unwilling to bestow. Since Charles is both pressured by economics and passionately in love with a steely-nerved woman named Una who insists she’ll only marry a man who can give her the finer things in life (the “Una, O Una” passages of the book lead to the inescapable conclusion that Crofts never in his life felt romantic passion for a woman), the law-abiding nephew immediately begins thinking of killing his uncle in order to get his inheritance. And such thoughts bother him, as Crofts takes the trouble to explain to us:

‘I’ve got good news for you, uncle,’ he began cheerily as he could. But for the moment he could not go on. Unexpectedly he experienced a painful revulsion of feeling. He had always ridiculed the idea of conscience, but the effort to be cheery now made something very like conscience grip him. He felt he simply could not talk in an easy, friendly way to this old man, whose life he meditated taking. Suddenly he got a glimpse of what he was really doing, and he felt a little sick. He felt dirty also, somehow soiled, as if he were a traitor, about to stab his trusting friend in the back.

His uncle is forever popping pills for his various ailments, and this gives Charlie-boy the idea to insert some poison tablets amongst the healthier kind. As Dr. Ingram, one of Croft’s endless gallery of talking heads, makes clear:

‘Potassium cyanide is one of the most deadly and rapid of known poisons,’ he declared with the air of a professor lecturing to a class. ‘Death has occurred within three or four minutes of taking it, and unconsciousness within a few seconds. Of course its effects are not always so rapid as this, but it is usually a matter of minutes.’

So: a body on the plane, and French on the case, and soon enough Charles is standing trial for murder, prosecuted by Sir Richard Brander, who, no slouch in the talking heads department, explains things to the jury:

‘The main features of this unhappy case are not new. Probably as far back as history goes we could find parallels, continue to be paralleled. It belongs to the type of murder for gain. The prisoner, I shall show, was embarrassed financially. He was also heir to a considerable sum. He is charged with murdering the testator to obtain that sum of money and so to relieve himself of his difficulties.’

There’s not a single inch of this book that’s innovative or interesting, except for the meta-critical reason of its fascination with the comparatively new-fangled industry of commercial air traffic. Crofts was that kind of hack writer, constantly sniffing around for the cutting-edge hook on which he could hang his next tale. If he were alive and working today, his three forthcoming books would be The Sochi Strangler, The Bitcoin Murders, and Fatal Flappy Bird. Alas – or fortunately, if you, too, are a murder mystery addict – he has plenty of literary spawn to fill that void in the 21st century.