Freeman Wills Crofts was born in Dublin, the son of a deceased Army Medical Service surgeon-lieutenant. His mother re-married Jonathan Harding, the Vicar of Gilford, and Crofts spent his childhood in the Gilford vicarage. He attended Methodist College and Campbell College in Belfast. At age eighteen, he was apprenticed to his uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, who was chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. He eventually became Chief Assistant Engineer at the Railway. In 1919, during an illness-induced absence from work, he wrote his first novel, The Cask (1920), which established him as a new master of detective fiction. Crofts continued to write steadily, producing a book almost every year for thirty years, in addition to a number of short stories and plays.