Richard Austin Freeman (11 April 1862 London - 28 September 1943 Gravesend) — known as R. Austin Freeman — was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr Thorndyke. He claimed to have invented the inverted detective story (a crime fiction in which the commission of the crime is described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator, with the story then describing the detective's attempt to solve the mystery) and used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in his novels.
A large proportion of the Dr Thorndyke stories involve genuine, but often quite arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from areas such as tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology.
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Austin Freeman was the youngest of the five children of tailor Richard Freeman and Ann Maria Dunn. He first trained as an apothecary and then studied medicine at Middlesex Hospital, qualifying in 1887. The same year he married Annie Elizabeth with whom he had two sons. He entered the Colonial Service and was sent to Accra on the Gold Coast.
In 1891 he returned to London after suffering from blackwater fever but was unable to find a permanent medical position, and so decided to settle down in Gravesend and earn money from writing fiction, while continuing to practice medicine. His first stories were written in collaboration with Dr John James Pitcairn (1860-1936), medical officer at Holloway Prison and published under the nom de plume "Clifford Ashdown". His first Thorndyke story, The Red Thumb Mark, was published in 1907 and shortly afterwards he pioneered the inverted detective story, in which the identity of the criminal is shown from the beginning: some short stories with this feature were collected in The Singing Bone in 1912. During the First World War he served as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and afterwards produced a Thorndyke novel almost every year until his death in 1943.
Freeman claimed to have invented the inverted detective story in his 1912 collection of short stories The Singing Bone. "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."[1]
"Indicative of his power is the fact that Mr. Polton Explains, in some ways his best novel, was written in part in a bomb shelter in 1939, when Freeman was 77 years old. ... For the first twenty-five years of his career, at least, he dominated the world of British detective fiction. ... Freeman was always in the forefront of the form. Today, with Chesterton, who is remembered for other reasons, he is one of the very few Edwardian detective story writers who are still read."[2]
"Raymond Chandler, whose essay 'The Simple Art of Murder' did much toward demolishing the classical detective story, had this to say in a letter to Hamish Hamilton, the British publisher: 'This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre, and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing, he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected ... There is even a gaslight charm about his Victorian love affairs, and those wonderful walks across London ...' Most of us agree with Chandler."[2]
The short-story collections are:
These five collections contain together 38 from the below mentioned 40 stories. The two other Thorndyke stories were published in The Great Portrait Mystery and other stories (1918). This book contains 7 stories, but only two about Thorndyke. The titles of the 2 Thorndyke stories are The missing mortgagee and Percival Bland's proxy.
Two different omnibus editions of the collected Dr. Thorndyke short stories exist. The British edition is R. Austin Freeman, The Famous Cases of Dr. Thorndyke: Thirty-seven of His Criminal Investigations as set down by R. Austin Freeman (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1929 and later reprintings). The American edition is R. Austin Freeman, The Dr. Thorndyke Omnibus: 38 of His Criminal Investigations as set down by R. Austin Freeman (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1932 and later reprintings). The American edition includes one story, "The Mandarin's Pearl," printed in the first Thorndyke short-story collection, John Thorndyke's Cases, but omitted from the British omnibus. Two other stories, though also appearing in the first Dr. Thorndyke short-story collection, John Thorndyke's Cases, were omitted from the British and American editions of the omnibus collection: "The Man with the Nailed Shoes" and "A Message from the Deep Sea."
The order in the list appearing below is that of the American edition, which reprinted the five collections of stories in the following order (with two omissions noted below): The Singing Bone [UK 01-04], The Great Portrait Mystery and other stories [UK 05-06], The Singing Bone [UK 07], Dr. Thorndyke's Cases, The Magic Casket, The Puzzle Lock, and The Blue Scarab. The British edition gives the stories in a different order from that of the American edition, indicated below by a bracketed note appearing after each story title giving its place in the British edition, denoted by the abbreviation UK and a two-digit number.
The first six stories of the list are "inverted" detective stories, divided into two parts; in the first part of each story, Freeman presented an account of the commission of crime, and then, in the second part, he presented an account, as told by Thorndyke's colleague Dr. Christopher Jervis, of Dr. Thorndyke's solution of the crime. These inverted stories are generally deemed by critics and scholars of the field to be his most creative contributions to the writing of detective stories, but the remaining stories, called "direct" stories, are also well-wrought and entertaining.
A modern publisher, Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, has issued a 10-volume edition of the complete works of R. Austin Freeman, including all the Thorndyke novels and short stories. It is available upon order.
There also exist two other Thorndyke stories, which were uncollected during his lifetime. 31, New Inn (circa 1905) is a short story, later completely rewritten as a full-length novel, The Mystery of 31 New Inn. Other people suggest 1911 as year of publication. The other short story is The Dead Hand (1912) that was later developed into the novel The Shadow of the Wolf.
31, New Inn was published in The Best Dr. Thorndyke Detective Stories (1973), edited by E.F. Bleiler, and in volume I of the Freeman omnibus, published by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. The Dead Hand was published in The Dead Hand and Other Uncollected Stories, edited by Douglas G. Greene and Tony Medawar (Shelburne, Ontario: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1999). The Dead Hand is also published in Detection by Gaslight, 14 Victorian detective stories, an anthology by Douglas Greene (Dover. 1997).
In 2011 the BBC aired a radio adaptation of some of the Thorndyke short stories, Thorndyke: Forensic Investigator, read by Jim Norton, on BBC Radio 4 Extra.[1]