The Pit-Prop Syndicate

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1922

‘Danger in Shroude Valley’ first published in

The Golden Book of the Year by Blandford Press 1950

Copyright © Estate of Freeman Wills Crofts 1922, 1950

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1930, 2020

Introduction © John Curran 2018

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008190552

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008190569

Version: 2020-01-17

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Pit-Prop Syndicate

Introduction

Part I: The Amateurs

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Part II: The Professionals

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Danger in Shroude Valley

Acknowledgments

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

THE PIT-PROP SYNDICATE

‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

INTRODUCTION

‘MR CROFTS is the master of this austere, unsensational but—to minds who enjoy stubborn but logical reasoning—enthralling type of puzzle fiction.’

This assessment of Freeman Wills Crofts’ output by author and publisher Michael Sadleir in a BBC radio review of an early Crofts title was both accurate and very fair. In fact, it remained true for the rest of Croft’s career; and, indeed, to this day.

To Crofts belongs the shared honour of inaugurating the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. The publication of his first novel, The Cask, in 1920 launched that celebrated era in the history of crime fiction. Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles is usually bracketed alongside it, although, to be strictly accurate, its 1920 publication was only in the US, with UK publication delayed until January 1921.

The Cask, in many ways, created the template for a Crofts detective story: a meticulous investigation carried out with painstaking attention to detail and focusing, for the most part, on alibis and timetables. The reader is at the detective’s side throughout the book as he doggedly pursues even the slightest clue, forcing it to give up its secret. Having achieved considerable success with The Cask, Crofts remained faithful, to a greater or lesser degree, to this type of story for the rest of his writing career. And so it is with The Pit-Prop Syndicate: there is little action, and the only excitement is of the cerebral kind. But this did not prevent Crofts becoming one of the ‘Big Five’ of Golden Age detective fiction, alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, R. Austin Freeman and H. C. Bailey. More than half a century after its publication, the author, reviewer and crime fiction historian, Julian Symons, chose The Pit-Prop Syndicate for inclusion in his list of ‘The Hundred Best Crime and Mystery Books’, compiled for The Sunday Times in 1957.

Crofts followed his first novel with a more traditional country house mystery, The Ponson Case in 1921; his third book, The Pit-Prop Syndicate, appeared in 1922, and The Groote Park Murder, set partly in South Africa, followed the year after. In each of his first four books an official police investigator carries out the investigation: Inspector Burnley in The Cask; Tanner in Ponson; Willis in Pit-Prop; Vandam in Groote Park. This experimentation finally brought about the emergence of Crofts’ signature detective, Joseph French, who made his debut in 1925 in Inspector French’s Greatest Case and subsequently appeared in all of his remaining books. The earlier incarnations were not as immortal as Inspector French, although they differ little from the eventual series character.

In a 1932 letter to his publisher Crofts gave a description of French, notable only for its vagueness, which, as we will see, was intentional:

‘… rather stoutish man of slightly below middle height, blue-eyed, with a pleasant, comfortable, cheery expression … not distinguishable in dress from any other civilian … suave and pleasant … dressed in an ordinary lounge suit.’

In clarification he goes on to explain that:

‘I have tried to make French an ordinary man, carrying out his work in an ordinary way. It seemed to me that there were enough “character” detectives, such as Colonel Gethryn, Philo Vance, Poirot, etc. Thus he has no special characteristics except being thorough, painstaking, persistent and a hard worker.’

Much the same traits can be applied to Willis, and indeed to the Inspectors in Crofts’ earlier books. Continuing a pattern he was to follow for the rest of his career, Crofts avoided the use of a Watson character and Inspector Willis carries out most of the Pit-Prop investigation on his own. Usually the Watson character accompanies the detective throughout the investigation, describing all that he (the only female Watson of note being Gladys Mitchell’s Laura Menzies, sidekick to Mrs Bradley) sees and hears; the Watson’s more important role is as reader-substitute, acting as the admiring audience while the Great Detective explains his deductions. Willis—and later French—has little need of such a device, as the detective himself shares his thought processes directly with the reader.

Crofts’ great strength as an author was the painstaking construction of his plots rather than character delineation. In his 1937 essay ‘The Writing of a Detective Novel’ (included in the recent Detective Story Club reprint of The Groote Park Murder) he notes:

‘If we are lucky we shall begin with a really good idea … it may be an idea for the opening of [the] book: some dramatic situation or happening to excite and hold the reader’s attention.’

Although the premise which precipitates the mystery in Pit-Prop can hardly be considered either dramatic or exciting, its very ordinariness—the inexplicable circumstances of the exchange of the numbered brass-plate on a ‘Landes Pit-Prop Syndicate’ lorry—is sufficiently intriguing to engage the reader’s curiosity. And even before we read of this minor mystery which first engages Merriman’s attention, our curiosity is aroused by a paragraph of foreshadowing, early in the first chapter:

[Merriman] did not know then that this slight action, performed almost involuntarily, was to change his whole life, and not only his, but the lives of a number of other people of whose existence he was not then aware, was to lead to sorrow as well as happiness, to crime as well as the vindication of the law, to … in short, what is more to the point, had he not then looked round, this story would never have been written.

The early chapters of the novel are somewhat reminiscent of the famous Erskine Childers’ 1903 spy novel The Riddle of the Sands. In that book two friends, while ‘messing about in boats’, notice something potentially sinister which demands further investigation. In the case of Riddle it is a matter of national and international security; in Pit-Prop it is of a criminal nature. But what crime exactly? That is the mystery facing Merriman and Hilliard and Willis; and Crofts manages to keep the reader equally mystified about this for most of the novel. Clearly Crofts was a fan of the sea and many of his titles reflect this: The Sea Mystery, The Loss of the ‘Jane Vosper’, Found Floating, Mystery in the Channel, Mystery on Southampton Water. His casual use of unexplained sailing terminology in Chapter III—‘flush-decked’, ‘a freeboard’, ‘binnacle’—is further indication of this.

Another personal interest merits a brief mention in the previous chapter when the ‘gentle hum of traffic made a pleasant accompaniment to their conversation [Merriman and friends at their club], as the holding down of a soft pedal fills in and supports dreamy organ music’. This unusually poetic simile reflects Crofts’ interest in music: he was a church organist and choir-master in his leisure time.

While Crofts’ undoubted strengths lay in the intricate construction of his plots, it must be acknowledged that his emotional passages are less than compelling. Even knowing that Chapter X was written almost a century ago does not make the love scene between Merriman and Madeleine any more convincing or less embarrassing, as these excerpts demonstrate:

She covered her face with her hands. ‘Oh’, she cried wildly. ‘Don’t go on. Don’t say it.’ She made a despairing gesture.

‘What a brute I am!’ he gasped. ‘Now I’ve made you cry. For pity’s sake!’

‘Madeleine,’ he cried wildly, again seizing her hands, ‘you don’t—it couldn’t be possible that you—that you love me?’

There can be little doubt that Crofts had read Fergus Hume’s best-selling The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. This inexplicably popular book, published in 1886 in Australia and the following year in the UK, went on to sell over half a million copies. It is directly referenced in Chapters XIII and XIV of Pit-Prop after the discovery of a murdered man in the back of a London taxi, circumstances reflecting closely a similar scene in which the Hansom corpse was found a quarter-century earlier. And echoes of his own first novel can be detected in Chapter VII when the detective duo put a cask to investigative use. Spending many hours inside the ‘confined space and inky blackness of the cask’ is a severe test of the dedication of the pair to their detective adventure.

In true Golden Age fashion we have three maps/diagrams. A page of Chapter XX is devoted to the drawing of a railway line and a discussion of train times; much of that chapter is concerned with rail travel—a real Crofts trademark. Although the map adds little to our understanding of the plot and neither of the two earlier maps is vital to the solution of the mystery, true Golden Age fans are always pleased to find a diagram in a story, let alone three of them!

It has to be acknowledged that the legality of some of Willis’ actions in pursuit of his investigation leaves much to be desired. Tapping phone lines, picking locks, capturing fingerprints (even when the site of one particular fingerprint is very ingenious) are questionable actions, to say the least. And that taboo element of Golden Age fiction, the secret passage, is also evident—although as the solution to the crime does not depend on its existence it does not contravene any ‘rule’ of fair play.

A minor mystery for modern readers concerning The Pit-Prop Syndicate might be the title. A ‘pit prop’ is a wooden beam used to support the roof of a mine, and in the days when mining was a major industry the provision of such items was an important and lucrative business. While words such as Murder and Death did not feature as frequently in the titles of crime novels at this point in the genre’s development as they were shortly to do, The Pit-Prop Syndicate is, by any standards, a very unexciting title.

Title aside, however, Crofts’ third novel offers a blend of thriller and detective story, roughly divided between Parts One and Two of the novel. Both sections show Crofts putting his engineering training to imaginative use, and are a foreshadowing of the enormously popular Inspector French novels that would soon follow.

DR JOHN CURRAN

October 2017

CHAPTER I

THE SAWMILL ON THE LESQUE

SEYMOUR MERRIMAN was tired; tired of the jolting saddle of his motor bicycle, of the cramped position of his arms, of the chug of the engine, and, most of all, of the dreary, barren country through which he was riding. Early that morning he had left Pau, and, with the exception of an hour and a half at Bayonne, where he had lunched and paid a short business call, he had been at it ever since. It was now after five o’clock, and the last post he had noticed showed him he was still twenty-six kilometres from Bordeaux, where he intended to spend the night.

‘This confounded road has no end,’ he thought. ‘I really must stretch my legs a bit.’

A short distance in front of him a hump in the white ribbon of the road with parapet walls narrowing in at each side indicated a bridge. He cut off his engine and, allowing his machine to coast, brought it to a stand at the summit. Then dismounting, he slid it back on its bracket, stretched himself luxuriously, and looked around.

In both directions, in front of him and behind, the road stretched, straight, level, and monotonous as far as the eye could reach, as he had seen it stretch, with but few exceptions, during the whole of the day’s run. But whereas farther south it had led through open country, desolate, depressing wastes of sand and sedge, here it ran through the heart of a pine forest, in its own way as melancholy. The road seemed isolated, cut off from the surrounding country, like to be squeezed out of existence by the overwhelming barrier on either flank, a screen, aromatic indeed, but dark, gloomy, and forbidding. Nor was the prospect improved by the long, unsightly gashes which the resin collectors had made on the trunks, suggesting, as they did, that the trees were stricken by some disease. To Merriman the country seemed utterly uninhabited. Indeed, since running through Labouheyre, now two hours back, he could not recall having seen a single living creature except those passing in motor cars, and of these even there were but few.

He rested his arms on the masonry coping of the old bridge and drew at his cigarette. But for the distant rumble of an approaching vehicle, the spring evening was very still. The river curved away gently towards the left, flowing black and sluggish between its flat banks, on which the pines grew down to the water’s edge. It was delightful to stay quiet for a few moments, and Merriman took off his cap and let the cool air blow on his forehead, enjoying the relaxation.

He was a pleasant looking man of about eight-and-twenty, clean shaven and with gray, honest eyes, dark hair slightly inclined to curl, and a square, well-cut jaw. Business had brought him to France. Junior partner in the firm of Edwards & Merriman, Wine Merchants, Gracechurch Street, London, he annually made a tour of the exporters with whom his firm dealt. He had worked across the south of the country from Cette to Pau, and was now about to recross from Bordeaux to near Avignon, after which his round would be complete. To him this part of his business was a pleasure, and he enjoyed his annual trip almost as much as if it had been a holiday.

The vehicle which he had heard in the distance was now close by, and he turned idly to watch it pass. He did not know then that this slight action, performed almost involuntarily, was to change his whole life, and not only his, but the lives of a number of other people of whose existence he was not then aware, was to lead to sorrow as well as happiness, to crime as well as the vindication of the law, to … in short, what is more to the point, had he not then looked round, this story would never have been written.

The vehicle in itself was in no way remarkable. It was a motor lorry of about five tons capacity, a heavy thing, travelling slowly. Merriman’s attention at first focused itself on the driver. He was a man of about thirty, good-looking, with thin, clear cut features, an aquiline nose, and dark, clever-looking eyes. Dressed though he was in rough, working clothes, there was a something in his appearance, in his pose, which suggested a man of better social standing than his occupation warranted.

‘Ex-officer,’ thought Merriman as his gaze passed on to the lorry behind. It was painted a dirty green, and was empty except for a single heavy casting, evidently part of some large and massive machine. On the side of the deck was a brass plate bearing the words in English ‘The Landes Pit-Prop Syndicate, No. 4.’ Merriman was somewhat surprised to see a nameplate in his own language in so unexpected a quarter, but the matter did not really interest him and he soon dismissed it from his mind.

The machine chuffed ponderously past, and Merriman, by now rested, turned to restart his bicycle. But his troubles for the day were not over. On the ground below his tank was a stain, and even as he looked, a drop fell from the carburettor feed pipe, followed by a second and a third.

He bent down to examine, and speedily found the cause of the trouble. The feed pipe was connected to the bottom of the tank by a union, and the nut, working slack, had allowed a small but steady leak. He tightened the nut and turned to measure the petrol in the tank. A glance showed him that a mere drain only remained.

‘Curse it all,’ he muttered, ‘that’s the second time that confounded nut has left me in the soup.’

His position was a trifle awkward. He was still some twenty-five kilometres from Bordeaux, and his machine would not carry him more than perhaps two. Of course, he could stop the first car that approached, and no doubt borrow enough petrol to make the city, but all day he had noticed with surprise how few and far between the cars were, and there was no certainty that one would pass within reasonable time.

Then the sound of the receding lorry, still faintly audible, suggested an idea. It was travelling so slowly that he might overtake it before his petrol gave out. It was true it was going in the wrong direction, and if he failed he would be still farther from his goal, but when you are twenty-five kilometres from where you want to be, a few hundred yards more or less is not worth worrying about.

He wheeled his machine round and followed the lorry at full speed. But he had not more than started when he noticed his quarry turning to the right. Slowly it disappeared into the forest.

‘Funny I didn’t see that road,’ thought Merriman as he bumped along.

He slackened speed when he reached the place where the lorry had vanished, and then he saw a narrow lane just wide enough to allow the big vehicle to pass, which curved away between the tree stems. The surface was badly cut up with wheel tracks, so much so that Merriman decided he could not ride it. He therefore dismounted, hid his bicycle among the trees, and pushed on down the lane on foot. He was convinced from his knowledge of the country that the latter must be a cul-de-sac, at the end of which he would find the lorry. This he could hear not far away, chugging slowly on in front of him.

The lane twisted incessantly, apparently to avoid the larger trees. The surface was the virgin soil of the forest only, but the ruts had been filled in roughly with broken stones.

Merriman strode on, and suddenly, as he rounded one of the bends, he got the surprise of his life.

Coming to meet him along the lane was a girl. This in itself was perhaps not remarkable, but this girl seemed so out of place amid such surroundings, or even in such a district, that Merriman was quite taken aback.

She was of medium height, slender and graceful as a lily, and looked about three-and-twenty. She was a study in brown. On her head was a brown tam, a rich, warm brown, like the brown of autumn bracken on a moor. She wore a brown jumper, brown skirt, brown stockings and little brown brogued shoes. As she came closer, Merriman saw that her eyes, friendly, honest eyes, were a shade of golden brown, and that a hint of gold also gleamed in the brown of her hair. She was pretty, not classically beautiful, but very charming and attractive looking. She walked with the free, easy movement of one accustomed to an out-of-door life.

As they drew abreast Merriman pulled off his cap.

‘Pardon, mademoiselle,’ he said in his somewhat halting French, ‘but can you tell me if I could get some petrol close by?’ and in a few words he explained his predicament.

She looked him over with a sharp, scrutinising glance. Apparently satisfied, she smiled slightly and replied:

‘But certainly, monsieur. Come to the mill and my father will get you some. He is the manager.’

She spoke even more haltingly than he had, and with no semblance of a French accent—the French rather of an English school. He stared at her.

‘But you’re English!’ he cried in surprise.

She laughed lightly.

‘Of course I’m English,’ she answered. ‘Why shouldn’t I be English? But I don’t think you’re very polite about it, you know.’