Inspector French and the Loss of the ‘Jane Vosper’
To mark the publishing centenary of Freeman Wills Crofts, ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’, this is one of six classic crime novels being issued in 2020 featuring Inspector French, coming soon to television.
The Jane Vosper is plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic by a series of explosions in her hold. With no innocent explanation of the cause, it appears that someone must have sunk the ship for the insurance money. When The Land and Sea Insurance Company’s official investigator then disappears, Inspector French is called in from Scotland Yard to find him. French decides that the only way to find his missing person is to solve the baffling mystery of the sinking of the Jane Vosper first…
Once dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’, Freeman Wills Crofts was an Irish railway engineer whose brilliant first mystery novel, The Cask, was motivated by an extended illness in 1919. Outselling Agatha Christie, and renowned for his ingenious plotting and meticulous attention to detail, Crofts followed up with The Ponson Case (1921) and no less than thirty books featuring the iconic Scotland Yard detective, Inspector French.