The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts

First published in 1920; republished by Dover on May 15, 2019

This hundred-year-old classic was mystery writer Freeman Wills Crofts’ first published novel. Notable for its detail, the novel is both a police procedural and a detective story that challenges the reader to guess both whodunit and how’d he do it.

While supervising the unloading of casks from a steamship, a young clerk discovers gold sovereigns and a woman’s body in a broken cask. He and the manager of the shipping company report the discovery to Inspector Burnley at Scotland Yard. By the time Burnley arrives at the ship, however, the cask has disappeared.

Burnley’s investigation is methodical. He first tracks down Léon Felix, to whom the cask was shipped from France, and gets an elaborate account of the circumstances that led the shipment. Felix produces a typewritten letter from the sender, Alphonse Le Gautier. Felix assumes the cask contains a statute and some money. Burnley then tracks down the cask and opens it in the presence of Felix, who is distressed to find the body of Annette Boirac, the wife of Raoul Boirac. On her body is a typewritten note that refers to the repayment of a loan.

Burnley works with the chief of a Paris police, Chauvet, to investigate the crime from the French side. Chauvet assigns a detective named Lefarge, with whom Burnley has worked before. The two police detectives learn that Annette had taken leave of Raoul, who seems genuinely sorrowed to learn of her strangulation. The detectives assemble a case that points not to Raoul as the killer (he has an alibi) or to Gautier, who denies writing the letter or note, but to Felix, who was once infatuated with Annette, although he claims that the infatuation died before she married Raoul, a fellow art collector with whom Felix became friends.

The meticulous investigation involves multiple witness interviews, inspections of typewriters, and the discovery of incriminating evidence in Felix’s home. The police take care to make no assumptions and to look for all possible evidence of innocence as well as guilt, providing a model that modern American police detectives should emulate. Although they work long but civilized hours, Burnley and Lefarge never miss a meal, often dining together and enjoying a bottle of wine before resuming their investigation.

The case seems airtight, but in the exercise of due diligence, Felix’s solicitor hires a private detective named Georges La Touche. The detective admires the strong work done by Burnley and Lefarge, retraces every step of the investigation, and cannot spot a flaw. There seems no hope for Felix until, inspired by the sight of a beautiful woman in Paris (and who wouldn’t be?), he moves the investigation in a different direction and solves the crime.

Will the reader solve it? The whodunit offers only a few suspects, so guesswork might lead to a happy result, but the “how” is so intricate that the reader will need to be a more skilled armchair detective than most to figure it out before La Touch explains it all.

Crofts’ characters all display old world charm. The plot is enjoyable, although the wealth of detail requires patience and a good memory. No stone is left unturned, and then La Touche turns them all over a second time. This is a police procedural on steroids, although one that relies on plodding attention to detail rather than Sherlockian insight. Fans of fast-moving modern thrillers who can’t abide sentences of more than six words will probably find The Cask to be a poor choice. Readers who prefer cerebral fiction to shootouts will find pleasure in this ground-breaking novel.

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