When Sir William Ponson doesn't call down to his butler for his customary evening drink, the unusual turn is initially brushed away, but the alarm is raised once his servants find that he has disappeared from the house. It's only the following morning that, at the bottom of a set of rapids, a damaged boat-and his body-are discovered. Initially the death is assumed to be a horrible accident, but it's not long before enough suspicious evidence is found to merit a visit from Inspector Tanner of Scotland Yard.
The Ponson Case is Freeman Wills Crofts's second novel (following the well received The Cask) and amply demonstrates his skill in tightly plotted crime stories, in particular with his encyclopedic knowledge of train stations and timetables gained during his day job as a railway engineer.
A wealthy man's mysterious drowning gives way to a meticulous investigation built on train timetables, forged alibis, and the kind of quietly devastating detail that made Crofts a favorite among readers who like their mysteries solved by legwork rather than intuition.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
