The beginning of the synopsis for this book, The Cask was what caught my eye - While London dockworkers are struggling to unload a shipment of French wine, one of the heavy casks falls, shatters and reveals its cargo — sawdust, gold coins, and a female corpse.

Needless to say, I am thrilled I read it because it was brilliantly executed.

This book is a classic murder mystery. The characters were intriguing. The solution was unexpected. This book was a joy to read.

First published in 1920; republished by Dover on May 15, 2019

This hundred-year-old classic was mystery writer Freeman Wills Crofts’ first published novel. Notable for its detail, the novel is both a police procedural and a detective story that challenges the reader to guess both whodunit and how’d he do it.

While supervising the unloading of casks from a steamship, a young clerk discovers gold sovereigns and a woman’s body in a broken cask. He and the manager of the shipping company report the discovery to Inspector Burnley at Scotland Yard. By the time Burnley arrives at the ship, however, the cask has disappeared.

Burnley’s investigation is methodical. He first tracks down Léon Felix, to whom the cask was shipped from France, and gets an elaborate account of the circumstances that led the shipment. Felix produces a typewritten letter from the sender, Alphonse Le Gautier. Felix assumes the cask contains a statute and some money. Burnley then tracks down the cask and opens it in the presence of Felix, who is distressed to find the body of Annette Boirac, the wife of Raoul Boirac. On her body is a typewritten note that refers to the repayment of a loan.

Burnley works with the chief of a Paris police, Chauvet, to investigate the crime from the French side. Chauvet assigns a detective named Lefarge, with whom Burnley has worked before. The two police detectives learn that Annette had taken leave of Raoul, who seems genuinely sorrowed to learn of her strangulation. The detectives assemble a case that points not to Raoul as the killer (he has an alibi) or to Gautier, who denies writing the letter or note, but to Felix, who was once infatuated with Annette, although he claims that the infatuation died before she married Raoul, a fellow art collector with whom Felix became friends.

The meticulous investigation involves multiple witness interviews, inspections of typewriters, and the discovery of incriminating evidence in Felix’s home. The police take care to make no assumptions and to look for all possible evidence of innocence as well as guilt, providing a model that modern American police detectives should emulate. Although they work long but civilized hours, Burnley and Lefarge never miss a meal, often dining together and enjoying a bottle of wine before resuming their investigation.

The case seems airtight, but in the exercise of due diligence, Felix’s solicitor hires a private detective named Georges La Touche. The detective admires the strong work done by Burnley and Lefarge, retraces every step of the investigation, and cannot spot a flaw. There seems no hope for Felix until, inspired by the sight of a beautiful woman in Paris (and who wouldn’t be?), he moves the investigation in a different direction and solves the crime.

Will the reader solve it? The whodunit offers only a few suspects, so guesswork might lead to a happy result, but the “how” is so intricate that the reader will need to be a more skilled armchair detective than most to figure it out before La Touch explains it all.

Crofts’ characters all display old world charm. The plot is enjoyable, although the wealth of detail requires patience and a good memory. No stone is left unturned, and then La Touche turns them all over a second time. This is a police procedural on steroids, although one that relies on plodding attention to detail rather than Sherlockian insight. Fans of fast-moving modern thrillers who can’t abide sentences of more than six words will probably find The Cask to be a poor choice. Readers who prefer cerebral fiction to shootouts will find pleasure in this ground-breaking novel.

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The main thing you will take away from this book is how hard it is to write a good police procedural. Most early detective stories concentrated on the usually amateur detective, the characters, the drama of the crime and the brilliant or daring routes to solution. A few, particularly after 1930, attempted more realistic portrayals of actual police work, including the boring parts. But it wasn't until Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) in 1956 that anyone perfected novels that were up to the top standard of mysteries, showed an actual route to a solution that proceeded in logical steps from systematic information gathering and had some relation to real-life police work.

This early attempt is an abject failure. The idea is simple, the corpse of a murdered, beautiful young woman is discovered in a cask unloaded from a ship. The solution to the mystery requires painstaking tracking of the cask (or is it multiple casks?) through train schedules, ship schedules and hired carters in three countries. Page after tedious page gives details, which readers (or this reader at any rate) have to write down in order to have any chance of guessing the solution. When a reader does extract 3 pages of objective schedule information from about 200 pages of prose, he or she is left with a simple logic puzzle, but one that requires extensive trial-and-error to solve.

This might have some interest if it represented actual police work of the time, but it's entirely imaginary and unrealistic. There's no interest in the characters of either the victim and suspects, or the investigators (we learn more about what they eat than anything else about them). The writing is not stylish, nor the descriptions evocative. Dialog is aimed at the reader. There's no suspense, we care little about whodunit or why.

But my biggest objection is the solution doesn't work. If you're going to write an intricate puzzle mystery and ask the reader to do all the work to unravel it, be sure that your solution is feasible. All the author cares about is getting the cask (or casks) to the various points at the necessary times; he has forgotten that he must also provide motivation for characters to move it (or them) around. The solutions in the book, not just the final one presented as truth but the various theories advanced along the way, require wildly irrational behavior on the part of murderer and suspects. It's fine to present baffling details at the beginning to make the mystery interesting, but the author is supposed to explain those details as rational--or at least explicable--actions.

If you just read the book as a regular novel, without trying to follow the twisted path of the cask or casks, it's boring. If you try to solve the mystery, and at the end you think through the sequence of events the author proposes, you will feel foolish for having wasted your time given the absurd explanation.

This is not a bad story but this was very drawn out unnecessarily. The character constantly repeats himself going over the same evidence over and over. I even skim read huge chunks of this once I found this out. This book could do with being revised.

Early post World War one, London dockworkers are unloading a shipment of French wine. One of the casks of wine is dropped spilling bit of its contents. Not wine. But sawdust (ok, maybe packing material), gold coins, and alarmingly, a female corpse. The import company and the local police start tracking the cargo back to Paris . . . and I put it down.

The premise was promising. Turns out this is the republication of the original 1924 copyright. Now I like 'historical fiction', but I guess what I like is a modern author trying to paint a picture of the past. Not so much to read a book actually written by and at that time. All I could see in my mind's eye were the all the trite stereotypes of the ramrod stiff Brit and the formal dialog we associate with the time. Couldn't get past all that.

What a fine puzzle this mystery presents! Actually, it was the most mysterious police procedural I’ve ever read. Every aspect of the crime must be painstakingly investigated, but first Scotland Yard’s Inspector Burnley has to find out if there was even a crime committed because all the evidence was carted away. Then after a fine show of detection and just a little luck, he still has to both identify the victim and the crime scene before the guilty can be caught. That isn’t going to be easy even once he has enlisted the help of detective M. Lefarge of the Surete.
Crofts created a wonderful mix of clues, false leads, suspects, and detectives. I thoroughly enjoyed being fooled by all of it. Then at the end, I wondered why I hadn’t solved it with all the clues he gave us.
I would heartily recommend it to every lover of mystery stories. It was very clean. There were only a couple of ‘mild’ curse words.
I received this as a free ARC through NetGalley and Dover Publications. No favorable review was required, and it was my pleasure to provide my honest opinions.

First published in 1920 a golden age mystery book, The events take place in 1912 in both England and France. This is the first book for Freeman Wills Crofts, Interesting read with lost of turn, threads and complex plot. Good book overall with a solid. 3 stars rating. Keep in mind the age of the book while reading.

A very good classic whodunnit, engaging and entertaining.
The plot was complex, full of twists and turn, the mystery keeps you hooked till the last page, and the cast of characters is well written.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

law-enforcement, procedural, Paris, London, murder-investigation

A classic work combining the Surete and Scotland Yard meticulously digging about in order to get the right murderer enclosed in an airtight legal case in 1912. The plot crisscrosses the channel and has more twists and red herrings than the reader can deal with except to simply read and enjoy!
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Dover Publications via NetGalley. Thank you!