The opening chapter of this provides a lovely start, though it doesn’t really indicate what the rest of the book will be like. A family – Peter, his young daughter Rose, and his father-in-law Andrew – find they need to take an emergency plane flight to Paris (the titular 12:30 from Croydon). For Rose and Andrew, this is their first time flying, and they’re both excited by the experience. Crofts dispenses a hangar-load of period detail about the process of flying, made charming by the viewpoint character Rose’s curiosity. However, by the end of this chapter, grandfather Andrew is dead. The book then jumps back in time to before the killer even comes up with his plan. It’s an odd choice for an inverted mystery to start this way, but I think it works. Firstly, it lets eager readers know that there will be a murder, since it takes Charles a while to decide on murder as a solution to his problems. Secondly, it sets up some mystery about exactly how Andrew will be killed while in the air on a cross-channel aeroplane. And thirdly, it sets Andrew up as a sympathetic character. From Charles’s point of view, Andrew is definitely not sympathetic, and it can be easy to forget the tragedy of his death that we’re shown in this first chapter.

This book seems to have been something of an experiment for Crofts. An inverted mystery – not exactly a well-stuffed subgenre at time of publication – requires psychological insight into a mind unlike the writer’s own (or perhaps too like the writer’s own for some people…). It also means leaving the investigative side of things hazy. Both of these qualifications might make it seem an unnatural fit for Freeman Wills Crofts, king of the painstaking procedural investigation and depictor of institutional cameraderie. Oh, and possibly no great shakes at the psychology. Except actually, he does rather well here – even with the psychology.
Charles Swinburn is not that nuanced a portrait, but he’s an interesting blend of sympathetic and selfish, and the depictions of his thoughts as he manages to convince himself to murder his Uncle are convincing. He’s fundamentally too unimaginative to see any other life for himself than the one he’s clinging to right now, and he sees no other way to keep it than murder.

I found his rationalizations about his failing company plausible, and even sympathetic – partly accomplished by Uncle Andrew acting realistically out of touch about the whole “financial crash” thing. We’re also shown the social effects of Charles’s money worries, which are one of the things pushing him to breaking point. Charles may be a business owner rather than an employee, but concerns about layoffs and financial difficulties are still ugly reality in 2025.
What is not so effective is his mooning over love interest Una. Crofts’ character depiction skills can’t really stretch to a believable femme fatale, especially when all his ideas about romance seem to come from the previous century. Una is a very shallow figure of desire (for Charles) and hate (for the reader). It’s the thoughts of Una that disrupt sympathy for Charles, as he declares that money he could use for the business would go to winning her instead. I thought this was unneccesary; surely there were subtler ways that Crofts could have used to demonstrate Charles’s self-centred nature.

But regardless, I was sympathetic towards Charles enough to trigger the other surprising feature of the book: its tension. Crofts can actually do tension rather well, and here he’s able to use Charles’s somewhat delusional hope in order to increase it. Thanks to the narration, we readers know that Charles is about to come a cropper, but he doesn’t – and we are anticipating his reaction when the blow falls. In addition, his murder plan involves waiting, which Crofts makes very effective use of, as Charles gradually loses his cool. Crofts being Crofts, he doesn’t fail to show us every detail of Charles’s plan, and how Charles thinks every bit of it is foolproof. Of course, since the investigating officer is Inspector French, the readers know better once again… as the book draws to a close, more and more of Charles’s precautions come back to bite him, in a very neat and satisfying way.
The only downside of this is that I became impatient for when Inspector French would really show up; I missed the detailed investigations shown in Crofts’ straightforward mysteries.

Despite the tension, the slow pace of the book made it a bit more restful than a real page-turner. That’s something I enjoy about Crofts’ writing throughout his books. Another minor pleasure is that, unlike almost every other Golden Age crime writer, he doesn’t ignore Northern England – the book is set in a fictional place called Cold Pickerby (great name btw), just north of York. Any mention of Yorkshire in classic crime gets plus points on this blog! Another way that Crofts’ settings are out of the ordinary for the Golden Age is that they are industrial, and feature factories and the people who work in them. It’s refreshing when compared to the settings his peers tended to use.

Although I don’t think Crofts has quite the literary and psychological subtlety to create a truly brilliant inverted mystery, this is still a very enjoyable and satisfying read, and he does prove that he can Do Character if he really tries. The real successes of the book are the tension created by Charles’s worries, and the neat way his precautions put him in danger. It’s fun to try and spot the flaws in his plan. Towards the end, there’s some repetition, which combined with the slow pacing can get a bit frustrating, but I think it actually works well for the effect he’s trying to create at that point. Freeman Wills Crofts and the Inverted Mystery is a writer/subgenre combination that I might not expect to work, but in The 12:30 From Croydon, work it does.

Other opinions:

Fiction Fan Blog
The Grandest Game in the World
The Invisible Event
Jason Half
Mysteries Ahoy!