Freeman Wills Crofts FRSA (1 June 1879 – 11 April 1957) was an Irish engineer and mystery author, remembered best for the character of Inspector Joseph French.

In 1896, at the age of seventeen, Crofts was apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, who was chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway.

He lived at 'Grianon' in Jordanstown, a quiet village some six miles north of Belfast, where it was convenient for Crofts to travel by train each day to the railway's offices at York Road.

In his last task as an engineer, he was commissioned by the Government of Northern Ireland to chair an inquiry into the Bann and Lough Neagh Drainage Scheme.

[1] In 1919, during an absence from work due to a long illness, Crofts wrote his first novel, The Cask (1920), which established him as a new master of detective fiction.

Inspector French always solved each of the mysteries presented him in a workmanlike, precise manner – this method set him apart from most other fictional sleuths.

Agatha Christie included parodies of Inspector French alongside Sherlock Holmes and her own Hercule Poirot in Partners in Crime (1929).

His attention to detail and his concentration on the mechanics of detection makes him the forerunner of the "police procedural" school of crime fiction.

The program for Inspector French advises the audience that the clues that enable the mystery to be solved are all given before the beginning of Act II.