A REVIEW BY CURT EVANS:
   

FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS The Hog's Back Mystery

FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS – The Hog’s Back Mystery. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1933. Paperback reprint: Pan #52, 1948. Trade paperback: House of Stratus, 2000. US title: The Strange Case of Dr. Earle, Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1933.

   Three mysterious disappearances from homes arrayed around the ridge formation known as the hog’s back? Sounds like a case for Inspector (soon to be Chief Inspector, on the strength of this case) French!

   One of Crofts’ most praised books yet one of the hardest to find (it’s a little more available under its clunky American title, The Strange Case of Dr. Earle), it’s a book for the true Crofts’ devotee, with a solution hanging mostly on locations, movements and alibis.

FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS The Hog's Back Mystery

   There’s something intriguing about those multiple disappearances of seemingly blameless people, however; and the way French goes about solving the case, with no nonsense about love interest and such, also has interest.

   Crofts provides a little human interest in the beginning; but by the time of the final disappearance, he leaves off with the personal element and concentrates on French’s investigation, which is probably just as well with this author.

   Nor are there any of those foreign trips, something Crofts so loved to detail, with the action being confined within a narrow compass. A small-scale work, but very much the sort of thing Crofts does so well, for people who like Crofts.

   Historical note: John Rhode published the somewhat similar The Venner Crime the same year (though it depends characteristically on science rather than alibis). More I won’t say, except to ask, do great detective novelist minds think alike?