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Death of Freeman Wills Crofts, Engineer & Mystery Author

Freeman Wills Crofts FRSA, Irish engineer and mystery author, remembered best for the character of Inspector Joseph French, dies in Worthing, West Sussex, England, on April 11, 1957.

A railway engineer by training, Crofts introduces railway themes into many of his stories, which are notable for their intricate planning. Although Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and authors of the so-called golden age of detective fiction are more famous, he is esteemed by those authors, and many of his books are still in print.

Crofts is born at 26 Waterloo Road, Dublin. His father, also named Freeman Wills Crofts, is a surgeon-lieutenant in the Army Medical Services but dies of fever in Honduras before the young Freeman Wills Crofts is born. In 1883, his mother, Celia Frances (née Wise), marries the Venerable Jonathan Harding, Vicar of Gilford, County Down, later Archdeacon of Dromore, and Crofts is raised in the vicarage at Gilford. He attends Methodist College and Campbell College in Belfast. In 1912, he marries Mary Bellas Canning, daughter of the manager of the Coleraine branch of the Provincial Bank. They have no children.

In 1896, at the age of seventeen, Crofts is apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, who is chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. In 1899, he is appointed Junior Assistant on the construction of the Londonderry and Strabane Extension of the Donegal Railway. In 1900, he becomes District Engineer at Coleraine for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) Northern Counties Committee at a salary of £100pa, living at 11 Lodge Road in the town. In 1922, he is promoted to Chief Assistant Engineer of the railway, based in Belfast. He lives at “Grianon” in Jordanstown, a quiet village some six miles north of Belfast, where it is convenient for him to travel by train each day to the railway’s offices at York Road. One of the projects he works on is the design of the “Bleach Green Viaduct” in Whiteabbey, close to his Jordanstown home. This is a significant ten arch reinforced concrete viaduct approved in 1927 and completed in 1934. It carries a new loop line which eliminates the need for trains between Belfast and the northwest to reverse at Greenisland. He continues his engineering career until 1929. In his last task as an engineer, he is commissioned by the Government of Northern Ireland to chair an inquiry into the Bann and Lough Neagh Drainage Scheme.

In 1919, during an absence from work due to a long illness, Crofts writes his first novel, The Cask (1920), which establishes him as a new master of detective fiction. He continues to write steadily, producing a book almost every year for thirty years, in addition to a number of short stories and plays.

Crofts is remembered best for his fictional detective, Inspector Joseph French, who is introduced in his fifth book, Inspector French’s Greatest Case (1924). Inspector French always solves each of the mysteries presented him in a workmanlike, precise manner – this method sets him apart from most other fictional sleuths.

In 1929, Crofts abandones his railway engineering career and becomes a full-time writer. He settles in the village of Blackheath, near Guildford, in Surrey, and a number of his books are set in the Guildford area, including The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933) and Crime at Guildford (1935). Many of his stories have a railway theme, and his particular interest in the apparently unfalsifiable alibi often emphasizes the intricacies of railway timetables. Near the end of his life, he and his wife relocate to Worthing, West Sussex, in 1953, where they live until his death in 1957, the year in which his last book is published.

Crofts also writes one religious book, The Four Gospels in One Story, several short stories, and short plays for the BBC.

Crofts is a member, with Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, of the Detection Club which meets in Gerrard Street. In 1939 he is elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Crofts is not only a railway engineer and writer, but also an accomplished musician. He is organist and choirmaster in Killowen Parish Church, Coleraine, St. Patrick’s Church, Jordanstown, and the parish church of St. Martin’s in Blackheath.

Crofts is esteemed, not only by his regular readers, but also by his fellow writers of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Agatha Christie includes parodies of Inspector French alongside Sherlock Holmes and her own Hercule Poirot in Partners in Crime (1929).

Raymond Chandler describes Crofts as “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy” (in The Simple Art of Murder). His attention to detail and his concentration on the mechanics of detection makes him the forerunner of the “police procedural” school of crime fiction. However, it has also given rise to a suggestion of a certain lack of flair – Julian Symons describing him as of “the humdrum school.” This may explain why his name has not remained as familiar as other more imaginative Golden Age writers, although he has fifteen books included in the Penguin Books “green” series of the best detective novels and 36 of his books are in print in paperback in 2000.


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Birth of Thomas Heazle Parke, Physician, British Army Officer & Author

Thomas Heazle Parke FRSGS, Irish physician, British Army officer and author who is known for his work as a doctor on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, is born at Clogher House in Kilmore, County Roscommon on November 27, 1857.

Parke is brought up in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim. He attends the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin, graduating in 1878. He becomes a registered medical practitioner in February 1879, working as a dispensary medical officer in Ballybay, County Monaghan, and then as a surgeon in Bath, Somerset, England.

Parke joins the British Army Medical Services (AMS) in February 1881 as a surgeon, first serving in Egypt during the final stages of the ʻUrabi revolt in 1882. As a senior medical officer at a field hospital near Cairo, he is responsible for treating battle casualties as well as the deadly cholera epidemic that afflicts 20% of British troops stationed there. In late 1883, he returns to Ireland, where he is stationed at Dundalk with the 16th The Queen’s Lancers. He arrives in Egypt once again in 1884 as a part of the Nile Expedition sent in relief of General Charles Gordon, who is besieged in Khartoum by Mahdists in neighbouring Sudan. The expedition arrives too late, and Gordon is killed. Parke later negatively recounts this experience in an 1892 journal article titled How General Gordon Was Really Lost. Following the expedition, he spends the next few years stationed in Alexandria, where he notably introduces fox hunting to Egypt, becoming master of the Alexandria Hunt Club.

In January 1887, while in Alexandria, Parke is invited by Edmund Musgrave Barttelot to accompany him on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. The expedition is led by Henry Morton Stanley, and journeys through the African wilderness in relief of Emin Pasha, an Egyptian administrator who had been cut off by Mahdist forces following the Siege of Khartoum. He is initially rejected by Stanley upon his arrival in Alexandria but is invited by telegram a day later to join the expedition in Cairo. On February 25, 1887, the expedition sets off from Zanzibar for the Congo.

The expedition lasts for three years and faces great difficulty, with the expedition of 812 men suffering from poor logistical planning and leadership. The rainforest is much larger than Stanley expected, leading much of the party to face starvation and disease. The expedition has to resort to looting native villages for food, escalating the conflict between the two groups. Parke, for his part, saves the lives of many in the party, including Stanley, who suffers from acute abdominal pain and a bout of sepsis. Stanley describes Parke’s care as “ever striving, patient, cheerful and gentle…most assiduous in his application to my needs, and gentle as a woman in his ministrations.” Parke also treats Arthur Jephson for fever, and nurses Robert H. Nelson through starvation. Furthermore, after a conflict with the natives, he has to save William Grant Stairs by orally sucking the poison out of an arrow wound.

During the expedition, Parke purchases from an Arab slaver a Mangbetu Pigmy girl, who serves as his nurse and servant for over a year.

After returning to Ireland, Parke receives an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and is awarded gold medals from the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal Geographical Society. He publishes several books, including My Personal Experiences in Equatorial Africa (1891) and A Guide to Health in Africa.

In August 1893, Parke visits William Beauclerk, 10th Duke of St. Albans in Ardrishaig, Scotland. He dies during that visit on August 11, 1893, presumably due to a seizure. His coffin is brought back to Ireland, where he receives a military funeral as it passes from the Dublin docks to Broadstone railway station. He is buried near his birthplace in Drumsna, County Roscommon.

A bronze statue of Parke stands on Merrion Street in Dublin, outside the National Museum of Ireland – Natural History. He is also commemorated by a bust in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

(Pictured: Photograph of Thomas Heazle Parke by Eglington & Co., Wellcome Collection gallery)