The Cask

Freeman Wills Crofts was a British mystery writer best known for his meticulously plotted detective novels during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. His stories often feature Inspector Joseph French, a methodical and logical Scotland Yard detective known for solving crimes through careful investigation, alibis, and timetables rather than intuition. Crofts’s works, such as The Cask (1920) and The 12:30 from Croydon (1934), are celebrated for their precision, realism, and engineering-like attention to detail.