At CrimeReads, "T.S. Eliot, Crime Fiction Critic," from which:
.... Like many a mystery reader in the Golden Age, T.S. Eliot had catholic taste in crime fiction and enjoyed both character-driven mysteries like The Moonstone and those which have been dismissed as “mere puzzles:” detective stories depending primarily on the mechanical cleverness of their plots to grab readers. ....
In The Criterion, the prestigious literary journal he founded and edited, Eliot had a forum where he could share his fascination with detective fiction and its aesthetics. Between 1927 and 1929 Eliot in its pages reviewed thirty-four mystery novels and short story collections, as well as two works on true crime. Like a kind of highbrow pope he lent detective fiction, at a crucial time in its development as an art form, the considerable cachet of his intellectual benediction. ....
...Eliot advocates a prohibition on outré devices: incredible disguises; insanity; occult phenomena and fantastic science; and elaborate and bizarre machinery, such as cyphers and codes, runes and rituals. Testing the nine mystery works in his review essay against these rules, Eliot concluded that of them R. Austin Freeman’s detective novel The D’Arblay Mystery was “the most perfect in form” (despite one violation). ....
Eliot had a half-dozen favorite authors of modern detective fiction, whom he “recommended to the small, fastidious public which really discriminates between good and bad detective stories.” These authors were R. Austin Freeman, Freeman Wills Crofts, S.S. Van Dine, J.J. Connington, Agatha Christie and Lynn Brock. Eliot had comparatively little to say about Agatha Christie and Lynn Brock, but he went into more detail on the four other authors. As early as June 1927, Eliot speculated that “Mr. Freeman and Mr. Croft [sic]…seem to be our two most accomplished detective writers.” On two other occasions in The Criterion, Eliot bracketed Freeman and Crofts as the finest modern mystery novelists. Austin Freeman, a contemporary of Arthur Conan Doyle who had created Sherlock Holmes’ greatest rival in the form of the brilliant medical jurist Dr. John Thorndyke, had produced his first detective novel as far back as 1907; yet, unlike Doyle, he was an extremely prolific producer of mystery novels and short stories during the Golden Age. Besides singling out Freeman’s The D’Arblay Mystery in his January 1927 review article as the “most perfect in form” of the nine books reviewed, Eliot commented in his June 1927 review essay that he regretted having no Freeman novel on hand to assess, as the author “has more of the Wilkie Collins abundance than any contemporary writer of detective fiction.”
In Freeman Wills Crofts, a railway engineer turned detective novelist who was a meticulous plotter (the acknowledged king of the “unbreakable alibi” story) but rather an indifferent literary stylist, Eliot could glimpse little of that “Wilkie Collins abundance.” In the critic’s view, however, Crofts did not stand in need of that abundance, for he had other gifts valuable to a spinner of mystery tales. ...Eliot noted...: “Mr. Crofts, at his best, as in The Cask [his celebrated 1920 debut mystery novel], succeeds by his thorough devotion to the detective interest; his characters are just real enough to make the story work; had he tried to make them more human and humorous he might have ruined his story. ....
T.S. Eliot’s mystery criticism in The Criterion reveals the great writer as a representative twenties detective fiction fan, one still amused with and mentally stimulated by the ingenuity of the puzzles crime authors were devising. .... (more, including a list of Eliot's favorite mysteries)
I haven't enjoyed Crofts or S.S. Vane Dine as much as did Eliot but I very much enjoy R. Austin Freeman. Most of these authors are now in the public domain and many of their books can be read online or downloaded free of cost.
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