Detective Stories 1

Prologue

The pioneering creator of the inverted detective story, R. Austin Freeman was a popular Edwardian author of novels and short stories featuring Dr. Thorndyke, a pathologist-detective. His claim to have invented the crime fiction genre known as ‘inverted’ detective stories – where the commission of the crime, and usually the identity of the perpetrator, is revealed at the beginning, with the plot then focussing on how the detective gets his man – has some substance but is not uncontested. He was prolific, popular and wielded much influence over the crime genre, dominating scientific detective fiction for a good part of the early 20th century. His novels continue to be read by a diminished but loyal audience and have been translated onto stage, screen and radio many times.

Dr Reichard Austin was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr. Thorndyke.

The last of five children born to a Soho tailor, Richard Freeman and his wife Ann Maria (nee Dunn), Austin Freeman trained as an apothecary and then studied medicine at Middlesex Hospital Medical College, qualifying as a physician and surgeon in 1887. That same year he married Annie Elizabeth Edwards with whom he had two sons. He entered the Colonial Service as a doctor and was posted to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in West Africa.

Invalided out of the Colonial Service following a bout of Blackwater fever (a serious complication of malaria) Austin Freeman returned to London in 1891. Unable to find a permanent job as a doctor in London, Austin Freeman and his family finally settled in Gravesend where he sought to earn money from his writing while also practising as a doctor. His first stories were written in partnership with his friend, Dr John James Pitcairn, a medical officer at Holloway Prison, and were published under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown. The first Thorndyke story, The Red Thumb Mark, was published in 1907 and soon afterwards he began to write his inverted detective stories: Some of these were included in The Singing Bone, a collection of short stories published in 1912.