Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Maybe Freeman Wills Crofts is less perennially famous than his fellow Detection Club members Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Still, his solid methodical police detective Inspector French is a personal favorite. Crofts made his living as a railway engineer before turning to crime writing in 1929. Many aspects of his previous profession bleed through, such as using railway timetables to make or break alibis or traveling railways across swathes of land to catch killers. However, Antidote to Venom breaks many of the standard tropes of his Inspector French series. Crofts outlines his new methodology in the author’s note:

This book is a two-fold experiment: first, it is an attempt to combine the direct and inverted types of detective story and second, an effort to tell a story of crime positively”

Freeman Wills Crofts, Antidote to Venom (1938)

In modern parlance, the author will tell the reader who the killers…