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Portrait image of Freeman Wills Crofts Photo: Hulton Deutsch / Corbis Historical via Getty Images (1952)

Sample of authors

Crofts, Freeman Wills

Freeman Wills Crofts was born in Dublin, Ireland, as the son of a British army surgeon who died when Croft was still young. Because his mother then married an archdeacon, Croft was brought up in a deeply religious home. He studied engineering, and at the age of seventeen he became an apprentice at the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway where he stayed until 1929 when he left for health...

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Literary figures

Max Van Larsen

Gender: Male

A depressed, middle-aged detective with a guilty conscience who works in the New York police section for missing persons. Max Van Larsen’s wife and 13-year-old son have died in a traffic accident, and he discovers that he has not known them well enough to be able to mourn them. He is, however, consoled when he meets the cheerful author Sylvia Plotkin, and together they solve the weird cases in t...

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