Inspector French: A Losing Game (Book 18)

Reading the whole of Freeman Wills Crofts Inspector French novels in publication order one sees an evolution in the author's style as well as, of course, the socio-economic context. This book is well up to FWC's usual standard. The plot structure, with a number of pre-crime narartives explained before French gets involved, chimes with earlier successful structures. There is a little less of the dogged following up of each and every clue (partly because of French's late arrival on the scene). The setting is Thames riverside stockbroker belt. The plot is adequately complex. The later phases take a slightly unusual form, with protagonists getting involved directly in the detection work: more implausible than usual, but not enough to offset all the other satisfactory aspects of this book. 4.5 - 5 stars.

Average. Another story about a woman who marries a man she does not love, then falls in love with someone else. Add in murder and blackmail and a detective who to the end gets it wrong, until a couple of excessively dim girls put him on the right path through their amateur detecting - and this is A Losing Game.Honestly this is not very original - the author has used the unhappily married story-line before, and blackmail comes up in his books so often that we seem to have every other criminal in England engaged in it at this period, which is hard to believe. The murder is a little more ingenious than some, but when the detective identifies the killer he then convinces himself it is probably not him and has to be put back onto the right track by the girls. A real run around of a story and despite what it says at the end it is not really a success for French!And yet again there are typos galore - not just words swapped around (at one point a woman apparently believes she is going to farm - what, she is a spoiled brat, she would not know one end of a tractor from the other - oh, faint, much more in character) and there are chunks of paragraphs wrongly aligned all over. Publishers - get your act together.

I'm so glad they're re-printing the whole series, this is another enjoyable who done it with a variety of suspects to who killed a very unpleasant blackmailer. One person gets charged but French believes they are innocent and offers to help find the real culprit by his usual technique of following up all the supposed alibis and clues.

Certainly for Wills Crofts the mark is high. That is why, in this instance, there's but an average note for this story which spends a lot of time on nonessential things, indulges in character studies and has a really outdated view of women...