Inspector French and the Box Office Murders (Inspector French, Book 5)
By (Author) Freeman Wills Crofts
Book 5
HarperCollins Publishers
Collins Crime Club
31st August 2022
9th March 2017
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.912
Paperback
240
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 15mm
170g
From the Collins Crime Club archive, the fifth Inspector French novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, once dubbed The King of Detective Story Writers.
THE PUZZLE OF THE PURPLE SICKLE
The suicide of a sales clerk at the box office of a London cinema leaves another girl in fear for her life. Persuaded to seek help from Scotland Yard, Miss Darke confides in Inspector Joseph French about a gambling scam by a mysterious trio of crooks and that she believes her friend was murdered. When the girl fails to turn up the next day, and the police later find her body, Frenchs inquiries reveal that similar girls have also been murdered, all linked by their jobs and by a sinister stranger with a purple scar . . .
Freeman Wills Crofts crimes are solved with dogged diligence and attention to detail . . . they seem to have improved with age. INDEPENDENT
A detective novel by Mr. Wills Crofts is always an event to those who know Mr. Crofts is among the few muscular writers of detective fiction. He has never let me down.
HAROLD NICHOLSON, DAILY EXPRESS
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.