[2] It followed on from his debut in Inspector French's Greatest Case, in which Crofts introduced a character who was more methodical and less flamboyant than many of the other great detectives who followed in the wake of Sherlock Holmes.

Maxwell Cheyne, a First World War naval veteran and short story writer from Dartmouth, is lunching at a Plymouth hotel where he is doped and his home burgled.

A few weeks later he is tricked onto a ship and held without food and water by a gang that is searching for a vital letter sent to Cheyne several years ago by a friend.

Only when the gang kidnap Joan and try to kill him with an explosive device that he narrowly escapes at Marylebone Station does Cheyne at last turn to Scotland Yard.

In the later novel Sir John Magill's Last Journey French mentions that Cheyne and Joan are now a happily married couple living in Dartmouth.