Crofts, Freeman Wills (1879–1957), author of detective fiction and drama, was born 1 June 1879 in Dublin, only son of Freeman Wills Crofts, army surgeon, of Cloheen (Clogheen) House, Co. Cork, and Cecilia Frances Wise, daughter of a Dublin solicitor. His family, and their collateral branch at Velvetstown House, were tenants of the Percevals, earls of Egmont, protestant in religion and descended from Lord Crofts of West Stow and Saxham, Suffolk. Their more immediate ancestor, Richard Crofts (c.1570–1629), entered Ireland as a captain in the army Elizabeth I sent against Shane O'Neill (qv). He settled in the English enclave at Bandon, Co. Cork, where he became provost in 1615. Freeman's father died in Honduras (Belize) in 1878, six months before his birth, and in 1883 his mother married the Rev. Jonathan Harding of the Church of Ireland. They moved to Belfast, where Crofts attended Methodist College from 1891 to 1894 and Campbell College until 1896, when he was apprenticed to his uncle, Berkeley D. Wise, chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway (BNCR). In 1899 he was junior engineer on the Londonderry and Strabane extension of the Donegal Railway. By 1900 he had become district engineer's assistant, BNCR, at Coleraine, and by 1910 chief engineer of the Northern Counties committee at Belfast. In 1919 he wrote, while convalescent from a serious illness, his first novel, The cask, which was placed by the A. P. Watt agency with William Collins, who published it in 1920. It is recognised as the best first novel of its kind, and ultimately sold 100,000 copies in Britain, Europe, and the USA.
In 1928 he became a member of the Crime Club. By 1929 he was of sufficient eminence as a civil engineer to be appointed chairman of the Belfast and Lough Neagh inquiry; he had also published seven more successful novels and settled on his leading character, Inspector Joseph French of Scotland Yard. Deciding that his health would no longer permit him to combine writing and full-time employment, he moved to Blackheath, near Guildford, Surrey, where, as previously at Coleraine, he acted as organist and choirmaster, and where he was still very kindly remembered at the end of the twentieth century. At about the time of this move, he ‘asked God to take over my life’ and joined Moral Rearmament: ‘I had found the real answer to crime’, he wrote in the Guildford City Outlook of February 1939. He continued to publish with Collins until 1932 (Death on the way); thereafter his work was published by Hodder. In 1939 he was elected FRSA. The first work to appear in paperback was The pit prop syndicate (Penguin Books, 1945); Penguin published eight further titles between then and 1953 and six more between 1955 and 1959; Pan Books published five between 1948 and 1954. Crofts's meticulously researched, good-humoured, and extremely readable detective stories are of the ‘unbreakable alibi’ genre. Their success was such that in the 1930s he was recognised as one of the ‘Big Three’ (with Agatha Christie and E. C. Bentley). His complete oeuvre comprises thirty-four detective novels (one of them, the congenial Young Robin Brand, detective, for boys), three ‘Round Robin’ detective works, three volumes of short stories, plays for radio, and a religious work, The four Gospels in one story (1949). Two of his books – Sir John Magill's last journey (1930) and Man overboard (1936) – are set in Ulster. Other volumes worthy of note are Crime at Guildford (1935), set, like The Hog's Back mystery (1933), in Surrey; The loss of the Jane Vosper (1936); and Death of a train (1946). In 2001–2 House of Stratus reprinted all his novels and short stories.
In 1953 Crofts moved to Worthing, where, after completing his final novel, Anything to declare, he died on 11 April 1957, leaving the copyright of his novels to the RSA, their profits to be dedicated to authors in need. He married (1912) Mary Bellas Canning (d. at Worthing, 28 February 1964), daughter of a Coleraine bank manager; there were no children. Most of Crofts's papers are in the Society of Authors Archive, vol. cxi (ff 1–67), BL 56685. The BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading, holds correspondence (1940–53) and the scripts of a number of radio plays. Correspondence with Penguin Books is in the special collections of the Bristol University Library.
Even though most of his books were printed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic and some of them translated into various languages, including Irish, little has been written about either the life (there is no biography) or the work of Crofts. The best accounts are listed below; Julian Symons makes a number of informed and critical biographical points.