R. Austin Freeman

• Born: April 11, 1862
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 28, 1943
• Place of death: Gravesend, Kent, England

Types of Plot: Inverted; private investigator

Principal Series: Dr. Thorndyke, 1907-1942

Contribution

R. Austin Freeman is perhaps most significant as one of the inventors of the inverted detective story, in which the reader observes the crime being committed from the criminal’s point of view and then shifts to that of the detective to watch the investigation and solution of the puzzle. These stories depend on the reader’s interest in the process of detection, rather than on the desire to know “who done it.”

Freeman’s most important character, Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, was the first true scientific investigator, a realistic, utterly believable character whose solutions relied more on esoteric knowledge and laboratory analysis than on intuition, psychology, or physical force. As opposed to those who study people, Thorndyke is interested only in things. Though all necessary clues are laid out before the reader, it would be a rare reader, indeed, who was sufficiently versed in Egyptology, chemistry, anatomy, or archaeology to make sense of all the evidence.

The Thorndyke stories, intended in part to educate the reader about criminology, are nevertheless filled with believable and attractive characters, love interests, interesting settings, and vivid descriptions of London fogs, dense woods, and seafaring vessels.

Biography

Richard Austin Freeman was born on April 11, 1862, in his parents’ home in the West End of London. The son of a tailor, Freeman declined to follow his father’s trade, and at the age of eighteen he became a medical student at Middlesex Hospital. In 1887, he qualified as a physician and surgeon. Earlier that same year, he had married Annie Elizabeth Edwards, and on completion of his studies he entered the Colonial Service, becoming assistant colonial surgeon at Accra on the Gold Coast. During his fourth year in Africa, he developed a case of blackwater fever and was sent home as an invalid. Freeman’s adventures in Africa are recorded in his first published book, Travels and Life in Ashanti and Jaman (1898).

Little is known of the next ten years of Freeman’s life. After a long period of convalescence, he eventually gave up medicine and turned to literature for his livelihood. Freeman’s first works of fiction, two series of Romney Pringle adventures, were published in Cassell’s Magazine in 1902-1903 under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown and were written in collaboration with John James Pitcairn. In his later life, Freeman denied knowledge of these stories, and the name of his collaborator was unknown until after Freeman’s death.

Freeman published his first Thorndyke novel, The Red Thumb Mark, in 1907. It was scarcely noticed, but the first series of Thorndyke short stories in Pearson’s Magazine in 1908 was an immediate success. Most of these stories were published as John Thorndyke’s Cases in 1909.

By then, Freeman was in his late forties. He continued his writing, producing a total of twenty-nine Thorndyke volumes, and maintained his love of natural history and his curiosity about matters scientific for the remainder of his life. He maintained a home laboratory, where he conducted all the analyses used in his books. He suspended work for a short time in his seventies, when England declared war, but soon resumed writing in an air-raid shelter in his garden. Stricken with Parkinson’s disease, Freeman died on September 28, 1943.

Analysis

In his 1941 essay “The Art of the Detective Story,” R. Austin Freeman describes the beginning of what would become his greatest contribution to mystery and detective fiction—the inverted tale:

Some years ago I devised, as an experiment, an inverted detective story in two parts. The first part was a minute and detailed description of a crime, setting forth the antecedents, motives, and all attendant circumstances. The reader had seen the crime committed, knew all about the criminal, and was in possession of all the facts. It would have seemed that there was nothing left to tell. But I calculated that the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the evidence. And so it turned out. The second part, which described the investigation of the crime, had to most readers the effect of new matter. All the facts were known; but their evidential quality had not been recognized.

Thus it turned out in “The Case of Oscar Brodski,” which became the first in a long series of inverted tales told by Freeman and others.

“The Case of Oscar Brodski”

Brodski’s story is typical of the genre: In the first part of the story, “The Mechanism of Crime,” the reader is introduced to Silas Hickler—a cheerful and gentle burglar, not too greedy, taking no extreme risks, modest in dress and manner. One evening, a man he recognizes as Oscar Brodski the diamond merchant stops at Hickler’s house to ask directions. After a long internal debate, the usually cautious Hickler kills Brodski and steals the diamonds he is carrying. As best he can, the killer makes the death appear accidental by leaving the corpse on some nearby railroad tracks with its neck over the near rail, the man’s broken spectacles and all the bits of broken glass scattered about, and the man’s umbrella and bag lying close at hand.

It is not until Hickler has returned to his house, disposed of the murder weapon, and almost left for the train station again that he sees Brodski’s hat lying on a chair where the dead man left it. Quickly, he hacks it to pieces and burns the remains and then hurries to the station, where he finds a large crowd of people talking about the tragedy of a man hit by a train. Among the crowd is a doctor, who agrees to help look into things. The first part of the story ends with Silas Hickler looking at the doctor: “Thinking with deep discomfort of Brodski’s hat, he hoped that he had made no other oversight.”

If Freeman’s theory was wrong, and his experiment had not paid off, the story would be over for the reader at this point. The killer’s identity is known without a doubt, and any astute reader is sure that Hickler has made other oversights, so what else is there to learn? Luckily, Freeman was right, and watching the doctor—who turns out to be John Thorndyke—determine and prove the identity of the murderer is every bit as interesting as it would be if the killer’s identity was not already known to the reader.

Much of the success of this inverted story is the result of the skills of its author. As the second part of the story, “The Mechanism of Detection,” unfolds, bits of dialogue that Hickler overheard in the station are repeated, this time told by one of the speakers, and immediately the reader sees the possibilities inherent in going over the same ground from a different perspective.

Then another kind of fun begins: What did Hickler (and the reader) miss the first time through? In this case, at least one of the clues—the hat not quite fully destroyed—is expected, even by an unexperienced reader of mysteries. Before the reader can feel too smug about being ahead of Thorndyke on this one, however, the detective, with the aid of his friend Jervis and the ever-present portable laboratory, finds clues that even the sharpest reader will have overlooked: a fiber between the victim’s teeth, identified as part of a cheap rug or curtain; more carpet fibers and some biscuit crumbs on the dead man’s shoes; a tiny fragment of string dropped by the killer; and bits of broken spectacle glass that suggest by their size and shape that they were not dropped or run over but stepped on. The reader has seen the victim walk on the rug and drop biscuit crumbs, has seen the killer step on the glasses and gather up the pieces, and has seen him lose the bit of string. Yet—like Thorndyke’s assistant Jervis—the reader misses the significance of these until Thorndyke shows the way.

At the conclusion of the story, Thorndyke speaks to Jervis in a way that sums up one of Freeman’s primary reasons for writing the stories: “I hope it has enlarged your knowledge . . . and enabled you to form one or two useful corollaries.” Throughout his life, Freeman was interested in medicolegal technology, and through his stories, he entered into the technical controversies of his day. He kept a complete laboratory in his home and always conducted experiments there before allowing Thorndyke to perform them in the tales. Freeman was proud of the fact that several times he was ahead of the police in finding ways to analyze such things as dust and bloodstains and in the preservation of footprints. In fact, the Thorndyke stories were cited in British texts on medical jurisprudence. Freeman enjoyed telling a good tale, but he wanted the reader—both the casual reader and the professional investigator—to leave the story with more knowledge than before.

The Thorndyke stories are also remarkable and important because they introduce, in their main character, the first true scientific detective. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, whose intuition enables him to make astonishing guesses as to the history and character of the person responsible for a footprint, based in part on his knowledge of psychology and the social habits of people, Thorndyke relies on physical evidence alone to solve the puzzle. With his portable laboratory in the green case that never leaves his side, Thorndyke can obtain the tiniest bits of evidence (seen through his portable microscope) and conduct a sophisticated chemical analysis.

It is the breadth and depth of his esoteric knowledge that sets Thorndyke above Jervis, the police, and the reader: He knows that jute fibers indicate a yarn of inferior quality, that it takes two hands to open a Norwegian knife, what a shriveled multipolar nerve corpuscle looks like, how to read Moabite and Phoenician characters, and how a flame should look when seen backward through spectacles. All the clues are laid out in front of the reader who is with Thorndyke when he measures the distance from the window to the bed or examines the photographs of the footprints; as Jervis writes down every minute observation, the reader has it also. Every conclusion Thorndyke makes is the result of his ability to apply his knowledge to what he observes, and if the reader is not able to make use of the same observations, then perhaps something will be learned from watching Thorndyke. Freeman is very firm in his essay “The Art of the Detective Story” that a proper detective story should have no false clues, and that all of the clues necessary should be presented to the reader. The proof of the detective’s solution should be the most interesting part of the story.

Unlike Holmes, Thorndyke is not a brooding eccentric, but an entirely believable, normal man. He is also extremely handsome, a quality about which Freeman felt strongly:

His distinguished appearance is not merely a concession to my personal taste but is also a protest against the monsters of ugliness whom some detective writers have evolved. These are quite opposed to natural truth. In real life a first-class man of any kind usually tends to be a good-looking man.

Although handsome, intelligent, and wealthy, Thorndyke, no longer a young man (he ages through the first several books, but stops growing older once he reaches fifty), is married only to his work. That does not mean that the Thorndyke books are devoid of the love interest that was expected by readers in the first part of the twentieth century. In many of the novels, secondary characters are hopelessly in love, and in solving the crime, Thorndyke makes it possible for them to marry. Jervis himself becomes financially secure enough to marry his intended only when he is hired as Thorndyke’s assistant. The love plots themselves are charmingly told, filled with believable and sympathetic characters, but they do not interfere with the mystery at hand, and at least one critic has suggested that the love stories could be extracted from the novels, leaving satisfactory mysteries intact.

If he is sympathetic to lovers young and old, Thorndyke wastes no sympathy on another class of individual—the blackmailer. He is ruthless in tracking them down when they are the prey and on more than one occasion lets a blackmailer’s killer escape. It is no crime, Thorndyke maintains, for one to kill one’s blackmailer if there is no other way to escape him.

“The Moabite Cipher”

Besides characterization, Freeman’s great strength as a writer lies in his ability to move his characters through the streets of London and across the moors in scenes that are full of life. The opening lines of “The Moabite Cipher,” demonstrates this skill:

A large and motley crowd lined the pavements of Oxford Street as Thorndyke and I made our way leisurely eastward. Floral decorations and dropping bunting announced one of those functions inaugurated from time to time by a benevolent Government for the entertainment of fashionable loungers and the relief of distressed pickpockets. For a Russian Grand Duke, who had torn himself away, amidst valedictory explosions, from a loving if too demonstrative people, was to pass anon on his way to the Guildhall; and a British Prince, heroically indiscreet, was expected to occupy a seat in the ducal carriage.

This passage contains much that is typical of Freeman’s style. Thorndyke is a precise man, accustomed to noting every detail because it might later prove significant, and this discipline of mind shows itself in the way Jervis and the other narrators tell a story. Thus, the two men are not simply strolling down a street in London, they are making their way “eastward” on “Oxford Street.” These characters move through a London that is real (as with his laboratory experiments, the reader could easily follow Thorndyke’s footsteps through several of the stories), and Freeman is not sparing in his use of real streets and buildings, drawing on the local flavor of foggy streets in a London illuminated with gaslights.

The London described in the passage is gone. Similarly, Freeman’s vocabulary is faintly old-fashioned. Words such as “motley,” “amidst” and “anon” sound quaint to modern readers and help take them back to the proper time and place.

Also apparent in this passage is the gentle irony of tone, demonstrated here in the idea of the government’s sponsoring events “for the entertainment of fashionable loungers and the relief of distressed pickpockets.” Thorndyke himself is a rather humorless man, but he smiles rather often at the eccentricities and weaknesses of his fellow creatures.

Loungers and pickpockets are only some of the “large and motley crowd” inhabiting London—a crowd made up of colorful characters including Russian grand dukes, British princes, international jewel thieves, mysterious artists, collectors of ancient artifacts, secretive foreigners, and overdressed women who are no better than they should be. In a large crowd in a big city peopled with interesting figures, anything can happen—and in the Thorndyke stories, something interesting usually does.

Principal Series Characters:

• Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke , a resident of 5A King’s Bench Walk, Inner Temple, London, is a barrister and expert in medical jurisprudence. He investigates cases as a consultant to the police or private figures. He relies primarily on scientific knowledge and analysis to solve cases and is a remarkably handsome, humorless man.
• Nathaniel Polton , a domestic servant, inventor, and watchmaker, works wonders in Thorndyke’s laboratory and workshop. An older man, he is also an excellent chef, preparing food in the laboratory (as 5A has no kitchen). Utterly devoted to Thorndyke, Polton grows through the years from servant to partner and adviser.
• Christopher Jervis , a medical doctor, Thorndyke’s associate and chronicler, is a man of average intelligence. Although he records the tiniest of details, he rarely understands their importance.

Bibliography

Chapman, David Ian. R. Austin Freeman: A Bibliography. Shelburne, Ont.: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2000. Useful bibliography of the author’s works.

Donaldson, Norman. Donaldson on Freeman: Being the Introductions and Afterwords from the R. Austin Freeman Omnibus Volumes. Shelburne, Ont.: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2000. Collects together Donaldson’s commentaries on Freeman’s novels, revealing the trajectory of the author’s evolution, as well as the importance of his fiction.

Donaldson, Norman. In Search of Dr. Thorndyke: The Story of R. Austin Freeman’s Great Scientific Investigator and His Creator. Rev. ed. Shelburne, Ont.: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1998. Study of Freeman’s most famous character and his inspirations in the author’s life and experiences.

Donaldson, Norman. “R. Austin Freeman: The Invention of Inversion.” In The Mystery Writer’s Art, edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1970. Focuses on Freeman’s device of showing the murderer’s activities before introducing the detective.

Galloway, Patricia. “Yngve’s Depth Hypothesis and the Structure of Narrative: The Example of Detective Fiction.” In The Analysis of Meaning: Informatics 5, edited by Maxine MacCafferty and Kathleen Gray. London: Aslib, 1979. Looks at Freeman’s works as a case study to understand the particular structure of narrative deployed by detective fiction.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. A tightly focused study of the British detective genre.

Mayo, Oliver. R. Austin Freeman: The Anthropologist at Large. Hawthorndene, S.Aust.: Investigator Press, 1980. Study of Freeman’s use of anthropology in his works. Bibliographic references and index.