The Pit-Prop Syndicate

by Freeman Wills Crofts, Otto Penzler (Introduction)

Stranded on a French highway, a wine merchant discovers a conspiracy Twenty-six kilometers from Bordeaux, Seymour Merriman’s motorcycle runs low on gas. He is waiting for a passing motorist to come to his rescue when he notices a lorry turn down a nearby country road. Following it leads him to a mill, where an English firm manufactures pit-props for coal mines. They give him two liters of petrol and send him on his way, but not before he sees something odd. The lorry he saw on the road was marked No. 4, but it has been changed to No. 3—a peculiar incident that will lead Merriman into the greatest danger he has ever known. With the help of a customs officer, Merriman looks into the mill’s business, and discovers that nothing about the little English firm is as it seems. All he wanted was a few liters of petrol, but he has stumbled across the century’s most fiendish crime. This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Crime, Classics, Thriller, Historical Fiction, Detective

206 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Born in Dublin of English stock, Freeman Wills Crofts was educated at Methodist and Campbell Colleges in Belfast and at age 17 he became a civil engineering pupil, apprenticed to his uncle, Berkeley D Wise who was the chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway (BNCR).

In 1899 he became a fully fledged railway engineer before becoming a district engineer and then chief assistant engineer for the BNCR.

He married in 1912, Mary Bellas Canning, a bank manager's daughter. His writing career began when he was recovering from a serious illness and his efforts were rewarded when his first novel 'The Cask' was accepted for publication by a London publishing house. Within two decades the book had sold 100,000 copies. Thereafter he continued to write in his spare time and produced a book a year through to 1929 when he was obliged to stop working through poor health.

When he and his wife moved to Guildford, England, he took up writing full time and not surprisingly many of his plots revolved around travel and transport, particularly transport timetables and many of them had a Guildford setting.

In retirement from engineering, as well as writing, he also pursued his other interests, music, in which he was an organist and conductor, gardening, carpentry and travel.

He wrote a mystery novel almost every year until his death and in addition he produced about 50 short stories, 30 radio plays for the BBC, a number of true crime works, a play, 'Sudden Death', a juvenile mystery, 'Young Robin Brand, Detective', and a religious work, 'The Four Gospels in One Story'.

His best known character is Inspector Joseph French, who featured in 30 detective novels between 1924 and 1957. And Raymond Chandler praised his plots, calling him "the soundest builder of them all".

Gerry Wolstenholme
May 2010

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book even though it was probably a bit too long. I have given it four stars but I suspect that others who are not quite as fond of F.W.C.'s work as I am would maybe have found it a bit pedantic or even boring.

The reader shares every thought, suspicion, idea and action of both the two amateur detectives in the first half of the story and of Inspector Willis in the second half. Crofts' attention to detail is legendary and probably harks back to his previous occupation as a writer of railway timetables.

A most ingenious tale in which the participants are engaged in the production and export to England of timber pit props from France. But what else are they doing and why does it lead to murder ?

Brilliant stuff.

[Law Man · Rating 3 out of 5]

In part, good classic crime fiction. The nature of the crime is original, and the detection of clues well done. The time setting of the story - early 1920s - creates period interest.

The story is in two halves: first two amateurs try to find the nature of the crime, and evidence for it. Then the professionals (the police) take over.

What lets the story down is the character of one of the amateur 'heroes'. In particular, he falls in love with a woman at first sight, and professes his amorousness in a gushing crass manner which would make any self respecting woman run a mile. Further, he allows his desires to impede the pursuit of the criminals; in reality it would be perversion of the course of justice.

I have noticed a similar flaw in some of the (excellent) stories by Fletcher's contemporary R Austin Freeman. Did men really behave like this in the 1920s?

[Yibbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It starts out rather slow and gently builds to a jarring moment of action followed by numerous twists and a dramatic conclusion. It’s a style that I’ve never seen used by any other author to such dramatic effect. In this story, Crofts first teases the hero’s curiosity with an insignificant detail and sparks his interest in a beautiful heroine, and then slowly unfolds a conspiracy spanning multiple businesses and two countries. Then -
Crofts is a master at setting the reader up to fail. I was completely convinced that I had sorted the details and figured out the true solution. Oh! Was I ever wrong! It was really very fun being so completely fooled.
Added bit of fun… Crofts is extremely detailed in describing the locations and routes traveled by all of the groups in this story. So you can, as I did, track and see where it all supposedly happened. That was really fun.
I thought it was a good mystery and would recommend it.
There were a few curse words. For a murder mystery, it is extremely mild. There are very few details of the murder.

[Watchdogg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pit-Prop Syndicate by Freeman Wills Crofts
First published in 1922

It's been a few months since I've read any Golden Age British mysteries and I'm favorably impressed by this one. Set in about 1920, a British wine merchant accidentally comes across something strange and potentially unlawful when he runs out of petrol while motor-biking toward Bordeaux in France's wine country and he seeks help at a riverside sawmill. This is the beginning of a long drawn out mystery that involves smuggling and eventually murder. Inspector Willis of Scotland Yard gets involved and it takes all his sleuthing skills to unravel this detective thriller.

Today we are lucky to have so many forensic tools at our disposal, but a hundred years ago much of detective work involved only observation, interviewing, deduction, and persistence. I was amused at how far Inspector Willis would go without the benefit of a warrant to seek clues. Those techniques would be unlawful today. Quite complex but surely satisfying, so 4 stars for sure.

[Ron12901 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable read. Held my interest from page 1 till the end.

[Caryl Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this old fashioned mystery. I read some by this author almost 50 years ago. Workmanlike writer. Nothing fancy but so,I’d.

[rachelish · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's fine, it's just SO SLOW

[Kelvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 1922 book written by famous Irish mystery author Freeman Wills Crofts. This book is a standalone mystery thriller and is not part of Crofts’ famous Inspector Joseph French series. The version I read came with a great introduction written by Otto Penzler. Crofts was a giant during British mystery’s Golden Age period and he was credited with being the first mystery writer to regularly use the step-by-step method of police routine in detective fiction. I find the book quite interesting and has strong elements of amateur detectives, police procedural as well as action thriller. The title Pit-Prop Syndicate refers to a business of that name: The Landes Pit-Prop Syndicate. A pit prop (called mine prop in America) is a length of lumber used to prop up the roofs of tunnels in coal mines in the old days. A few countries export pit props to England during 1920s for the British coal mines. Nowadays metal supports have replaced wood pit props. Most of the book is about the detectives trying to figure whether certain suspicious activities they have observed mean there are some crimes being committed, and if so, what is the criminal’s game. It took us all the way towards the end before Crofts finally reviewed what was the crime and how was it done. The book is also quite action packed given it was written in 1920s.

Spoiler Alert. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is called The Amateurs and is a story about two young men who played amateur detectives to try to solve a mystery they have run into. Part Two is called The Professionals and is about Scotland Yard’s involvement in the case and its final resolution. The story started out with a young wine merchant Seymour Merriman traveling near Bordeaux, France, when his motorcycle ran out of gas. He saw a truck marked The Landes Pit-Prop Syndicate, No 4 and he followed the truck to the business (a lumber harvesting operation in a forest near Bordeaux) to get gas. That turned out to be a British company harvesting trees in France, to cut the lumber into pit prop for export to England for its coal mines. Merriman’s suspicions were aroused when he saw the truck he followed changed its sign from No. 4 to No. 3 in secret. At the sawmill, he also met the plant manager Francis Colburn and his daughter Madeleine, who Merriman immediately fell in love with. After Merriman returned to London he told his strange story to his friend Claud Hilliard, who worked for the Customs Department. The two suspected it might be some kind of smuggling operation and decided to find out. They returned to France and conducted surveillance on the sawmill operation, including the Syndicate’s steamer boat Girondin which transports pit props from the French sawmill to the company’s loading dock and distribution center in Hull in England. However, after carefully searching both the sawmill in France, the boat, and the company’s depot in Hull, they failed to detect any smuggling activity even though they observed quite a bit of suspicious activities.

A few months later, when the two were about to give up on their adventure and to report their suspicions to Scotland Yard, Merriman read in the newspaper that Francis Colburn (the manager of the Syndicate’s operations in France) was found murdered in a taxicab in London. Merriman correctly surmised the murder has something to do with the Syndicate and both he and Hilliard reached out to Inspector George Willis of Scotland Yard to tell him all they know. That started Part Two of the book and that is about how Willis cracked the case. It involves quite a bit of solid police work, including forensics, wiretapping, fingerprints, ambushing and other disciplines. It turns out the Syndicate was involved in brandy smuggling from France to England to avoid the excise tax England imposed on imported brandy. Since Bordeaux is center of the French brandy district, the Syndicate bought a forest next to a river and setup a logging operation. The French operation has two products from the lumber: pit-props which are sent to England by boat, and firewood that are sold to local merchants in Bordeaux. One of the Syndicate members, who own a legitimate brandy distillery in France, provided the brandy. The Syndicated outfitted two trucks with special hidden storage tanks to carry brandy. They would be used to purportedly transport firewood from the logging mill to the distillery. Every night, one of the two trucks park at the distillery overnight and the other truck park at the mill. At night, after all employees have left, the Syndicate member at the Bordeaux distillery would load the brandy into the truck’s secret brandy storage tank. At the same time, at the sawmill, the other member would unload the other truck that came from the distillery that day filled with brandy into an underground storage cask in the sawmill. The reason they decided to change the truck number was to try to distract people and not have them think that out of the six trucks kept by the sawmill for delivery, why are the same two always be used for the distillery run. It turns out that became their undoing. In any event, they also have a very ingenious system to move the brandy from France to England. They equipped a boat with a special hidden tank. On ground level, everybody can observe pit props being loaded on the boat in France and observe them being offloaded the boat in Hull during working hours. What nobody could see, however, is that at night, a Syndicate member would go below the dock using a special underground tunnel and attach a hose that connect the underground brandy storage container in the sawmill to a special hidden opening on the boat to move brandy to a special hidden tank in the boat. In Hull, a matching facility is used and brandy is offloaded and distributed in the exact opposite direction. In the end, the intrepid Inspector Willis went into the basement of the French wharf and were able to discover the underground tunnel and found the secret brandy cask. All the members of the Syndicate were ultimately arrested, and the murderer of Francis Colburn, the leader of the Syndicate called Archibald Archer, was hanged, his guilty established by fingerprint evidence.

[russell barnes · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could've been a doozy: Possible smuggling ring based in France getting away with highly elaborate and cunning plan gets busted by amateur sleuths on holiday before handing over the boys at the Yard to tie up the case. Chuck in a love interest, loads of maps, a murder and the fact two of the characters start the day with post-breakfast pipes and there is clearly nothing not to like here.

Sadly the sum doesn't add up to the parts. The first half, the initial investigations by a wine merchant and a civil servant, is way too long. This is exacerbated by the fact Merriman (the wine merchant) is unrelentingly annoying, mooning about after the love of his life, alternatively floating about like a 1920s Ophelia or flouncing off on strops. There's too much Merriman and not enough Inspector Willis in fact, who's dogged investigation in the second half speeds the tale up to its conclusion and brings the Syndicate down, via a series of slightly confusing train journeys.

I'd say stick with Mystery in the Channel which is so far my favourite Freeman Wills Crofts (of the two I've read).

[Pamela · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the second Crofts I've read, and it wasn't much better than the first. First of all, it was entirely too long. The same story could have been told in half the words and with half the irritation to the reader. It goes like this: Here's what the bad guys are doing. No, it's not that, but it could be this. No, not this but probably the original thing. But then again, it could be the second thing. And on and on, over and over. These aren't so much twists as annoying curves.

Even more annoying is Crofts' fascination with train schedules. I mean come on! Who cares if it was the 3:15 or the 2:56? Trainspotters are annoying in person...and even MORE annoying when they invade your book!

[Steven Heywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice two part adventure-cum-detective story where you are invited to follow the progress of the investigations in minute detail, including the false trails and occasional disappointments. The writing style is a bit dry and old-fashioned enough to be part of the period atmosphere without getting in the way of the narrative. (In fact it very well suits the characters involved.)

Read the introduction *after* the story. It doesn't include any big spoilers but is better appreciated after you've let matters take their originally intended course.

Added bonus is a young boys' adventure short story.

[Vintagebooklvr · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 1/2 stars. I didn't like this one. It is written fine but it is very slow. There is so much detail about how the smuggling might be done but then realize it can't be done that way. Even once discovered the details just get boring. The murder is a small part of the mystery and by no means the most important part. I didn't find the characters interesting either. This is my least favorite of his works.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aside from the too-quick falling in love that it shares with many other mystery stories I've read lately, this was a finely-crafted mystery. A better knowledge of boating terms would have helped my understanding of some details, but generally I enjoyed this book.

[ShanDizzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story became tedious in parts as if the author had no confidence in the reader's ability to reach the correct conclusions. He explained thoughts that were plainly gleaned. The mystery was interesting and the denouement was satisfactory.

[Samantha Glasser]

Read this book for free through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2013/2...

[Shirley D. Stahl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Very English Mystery

Complex and detailed, this book is typical of the 1920s era of murder mysteries. It takes concentration to stay with the plot, but it's worth it.

[Joan Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vastly Satisfying

Engaging story line and lively interesting characters. Enjoyed the whole book. Descriptions of the characters and scenery were greatly detailed.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: when Seymour Merriman stopped outside Bordeaux, he didn't know his life was changing. What followed was smuggling, murder and love.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1922 this golden age mystery is still wonderful

[Emilie Grimstveit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Horribly boring

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clever mystery, with an unusual kick-off: A young Englishman, travelling on business across France, notices a lorry-driver surreptitiously changing the number on his lorry. Intrigued, and also needing petrol for his motorcycle, he approaches the mill from which the driver had come, and meets an attractive young woman. On his return to London, he tells the story in his club, and one of his friends, suspecting there's more to the story, suggests they investigate. For the sake of the young woman, who he's fallen in love with, the original young Englishman is reluctant to involve the police, but when there's a murder they have to call in Scotland Yard and put their investigations to date in the hands of the inspector in charge.

The first half is the two friends investigating in a kind of Boy's Own Paper way, while the second half is the professional investigation led by the Scotland Yard inspector in a straight police procedural. There's still plenty of suspense and mystery left, though; exactly what crime the Syndicate of the title is committing isn't clear until late in the book, and the reason for the changing of the number plate isn't explained until even later, so that kept me, as a reader, on the hook. The romance subplot and the character of the love interest are severely underdeveloped, as was the style at the time, but the fascination of the mystery makes up for any flaws, and it's a solid, entertaining book of the period (about a century ago).

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because I was intrigued by the title. A pit prop is basically a log cut to a certain length to hold up the walls of a mine. At first the two young men who come upon the sawmill business that is producing these props for mines think that it is really a smuggling operation and the props are being hollowed out to accommodate a container of brandy that can then be carried by boat from Bordeaux to England. There is a pretty girl too, and one of the fellows uses all the excuses he can find to call on her. He takes his friend who just happens to work for British Customs who is more interested in the business than any girl he meets.

As usual, this is a detail-oriented book. I enjoy this kind of procedural when it is the police doing the investigating, not particularly when it is amateurs who bungle about with a lot of luck. Fortunately, one of the men has the sense to go to the police, but not until they have hidden in crevices and crept about empty cellars in the dark and run every risk of being caught imaginable.

My book is a Penguin edition published in 1965. It does have a cover picture, but GoodReads apparently doesn't have it to scan for its files.

[GBL · Rating 3 out of 5]

First published in 1922, this crime mystery novel starts with a chance encounter in France when a young British man runs out of petrol on a country road and finds a sawmill where can get help. His suspicion is aroused when he sees the number being changed on the licence plate of a truck. Further investigation suggests there is a smuggling operation underway between France and England.

The novel is split into two parts with the first part being an amateur investigation by the young man and his friend into the smuggling gang and the second part when the police become involved. At times, the pace of the novel is slow but that is probably the difference between a novel from a century ago and a novel of today. The characters are interesting and the plot is complex enough to keep the reader guessing and engaged.

[Victor · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was not as bad as I had expected but its quite slow all the same .The book is divided into two parts .The first part is more of an adventure story and the second part is a police investigation where Crofts excels .The amateur part is not bad but becomes a bit boring towards the end as our hero swoons over the heroine and hesitates to call in the yard . The police investigation is more exiting and unravels the mystery of the Girondins cargo . The book has twist at the end that makes up somewhat for the lack of excitement during the investigation .
Overall, this is not a book that I would recommend to someone who wants to read his first Crofts .Neither I would recommend it to anyone who has already read a few Crofts as there is much better books after and before this .

[Carmel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love these old books. The language, pace and insight to domestic life in the 1920s is a joy. Modern writers cannot evoke the same authenticity, even with the best research. This is a solid detective story, set between England and France, over a period of a few months. Investigations in the 1920s were much slower than in modern day, but those investigating were still very sharp, and very patient! If you haven't tried one of these books before, get comfortable and give it a go.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually like Croft's books but I just couldn't get into this one, especially the first half. I think it's because I've read too many of these old mysteries lately with similar ideas--another Croft split in two halves with painstaking chasing down of clues that seemingly go nowhere, and one by Wallace with a similiar situation of a love interest possibly in danger from criminals. Time to switch my diet to something else for a while.

[Anthony J. Bentley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very fun, systematic investigation of a mystery, covering all the details of the mystery from start to finish. The main character changes a few times over the course of the book, which provided some variety—a good move. I only wish the romance were handled better.

The version I read: the ebook from Standard Ebooks. Free, high production values, free of typos. If you want to read it, I recommend this version.

[Brennan Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very entertaining and intriguing mystery. Different from the flash reveal type—where nothing is clear until the end. In this, the reader is privy to every question and answer as the book goes on. I liked it.

[Richard Flagg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this mystery of the pity prop Syndicate.

This being the first mystery of Freeman Wills Crofts that I've read I really found that I liked it. For a change of pace you might want to read it.

[Majolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silly old Golden Age mystery. Favorite part: Scotland Yard gets to randomly break into and search anywhere they want to.