Seven stories featuring Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, medical jurist extraordinaire and one of my very, very favourite detectives from the genre’s Golden Age.

First up, ‘The Case of the White Footprints’ (1923), which finds Thorndyke’s semi-occasional narrator Christopher Jervis visiting a GP friend who is called to an apparent suicide in a boarding house, a suicide which begins to look increasingly suspicious not least on account of the eponymous marks, made by someone climbing into the room over the recently-painted windowsill.

Jervis is given a bit of a chance to shine here, with technical proficiency shown through the taking of photographs and a good chain of logical reasoning building up a picture of the suspect based on their footprint alone. Of course, Thorndyke has to come in an upset everything — you can’t have your Watson getting all the glory — but the answer he provides of course shows some clever reinterpretation of the evidence. It’s not a solid gold story, petering out to depend on a medical curiosity rather than anything deductively brilliant, but it’s not without its merits…including the attitude of Jervis’ friend Foxton on being challenged at his lack of urgency when told of the death in the opening pages:

“What’s the urgency?” demanded Foxton. “The woman is already dead. Anyone would think she was in imminent danger of coming to life again and that my instant arrival the only thing that could prevent such a catastrophe.”

That amused me greatly.

The selection of adjective and noun in the title of ‘The Blue Scarab’ (1923) seems a deliberate nod-and-wink on Freeman’s part, given that this reads very much like an homage to ‘The Gold Bug’ (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe. The eponymous beetle-shaped knick-knack is stolen in a manner that, if we’re honest, doesn’t make a lot of sense, and turns out to be the key to a treasure hunt once a not-terribly-challenging code is deciphered…yeah, this is ‘The Gold Bug’ updated with a few new ideas and some clever reasoning about compass directions.

It’s a shame that Freeman chose not to play fair here and withholds the code from the reader, so that we might at least have played along even though only about one person in a thousand would possess the necessary knowledge. Freeman was famous for carrying out the experiments he outlined in his fiction, so I have every reason to believe this could be done — plus, he foisted that cuneiform tablet on us in The Mystery of 31 New Inn (1912), so why not the hieroglyphs here? He wouldn’t have claimed it possible without putting in the work to ascertain it, and it’s a shame for that work to go to waste…

And, for absolutely no reason at all, it tickles me that Jervis takes the time to tell us that they ate a “hasty, nondescript meal” in the middle of their discoveries. As someone who attaches a lot of enjoyment to food, I really feel his pain there.

Without wishing to cast aspersions on other titans of the genre, ‘The New Jersey Sphinx’ (1922) really does feel like a Sherlock Holmes story for a lot of its length, and as such I was fearing for the solidity of its conclusions when they came (I had one part of Thorndyke’s explanation marked for criticism as pure surmise). When a man is murdered in a boarding house in the cultural melting pot of Bloomsbury (!) and it transpires that a valuable ruby has been taken from him, Thorndyke comes to suspect that the eponymous killer, who has struck half a dozen times before, may be walking amongst them.

If this was one of your earliest experience with Thorndyke, you’d struggle to see how the character distinguishes himself from the great Holmes — analysing hat dust, pulling an address apparently out of this ether, dodgy reasoning swept aside because it suits the author’s purpose to move on quickly…all present and accounted for. And yet the closing stages, while not exactly convincing with the inexorable reasoning of the best Thorndyke stories, do add a layer of conviction to this which, certainly at this stage of his career, I feel Arthur Conan Doyle would not have been able or willing to provide. In the final analysis, it’s not a classic, but as a bridge between the old Victorian style and the newfangled British detective story this is a pretty good example of both.

Also, new favourite exclamation ahoy: “Great Solomon Eagle!”

Concerning the provisions of a will, lost when its maker is found in a quarry with his head bashed in and his valuables missing, ‘The Touchstone’ (1923) contains excellent forensic detection of the type that my naive ass had would have assumed — if you asked me maybe twenty years ago — wasn’t possible until, like, the 1970s. It also showcases Thorndyke as a great active detective, clambering down precipitous drops to take casts of footprints (excellently and clearly describe, so that readers unfamiliar with the process can follow it a century later — aren’t books wonderful?) and scouring the locality for propitiously-dropped clues.

I can fault this mainly in that the case is perhaps a little too well-solved, with an incidence of sheer bad luck for the criminal that rings a little false for me. We don’t require the discovered cigarette holder at all, and indeed the story is stronger if it is removed, highlighting the intelligence of the forensic investigations and their importance in achieving the apparent omniscience that Thorndyke so craves. Having previously dismissed the hoary standfasts of bloodhounds and fingerprints as infallible evidence, it would have been all the better if this story didn’t lean into the criminal also being a klutz and leaving obvious personal belongings at the crime scene, thus heightening Thorndyke’s own brilliance in our eyes.

But, well, it’s a minor complaint, and the story is enjoyable and atmospheric for all its transparency. I especially enjoy Thorndyke admitting that his cross-examination at the inquest in the final stages was “extremely irregular…the coroner ought not to have permitted it” — what a rascal he is. Also, how quickly does the solicitor Marchmont drink a cup of tea?! His mouth must be tender all day long.

Freeman seems to have anticipated criticism of the slim chances that keep occurring in his stories, as he starts off ‘A Fisher of Men’ (1923) by reminding us that…

“[S]urely your experience must have impressed on you the astonishing frequency of the unusual and the utter failure of the mathematical laws of probability in practice…It is the exceptional that always happens.”

I like the setup of this one, as a constable on his beat incites a man into fleeing and dumping his case and walking stick to ensure his escape, and Inspector Badger asks Thorndyke to cast an eye of both almost as a thinking exercise before Thorndyke and Jervis leave to pursue another investigation…which just so happens to intersect with that bag and walking stick.

Again, if you replaced the names this would read like an exceptional Holmes pastiche, albeit one that plays decidedly more fair than is usual, and it really does feel like Freeman is doing his best to apply his own clear-sighted reasoning to the new style of detective story that has started springing up around him. Some of the deductions — the grass under the tree, say — feel well within the grasp of mere mortals like ourselves, but when it comes to the knowledge that singles out a hundred-metre stretch of a riverbank you just have to smile and accept the brilliance of that intelligence.

We revert more to the Victorian style with ‘The Stolen Ingots’ (1922), in which a consignment of gold is stolen from a railway office while awaiting transfer to the train that will take it to its destination. When the loot — everyone keeps calling it “booty”, which made me mentally put a parrot on their shoulders — is tracked to a barge (and, it must be said, ingeniously hidden) the problem seems resolved…but, wait, there’s more.

If we’re cavilling, and we are, there’s again a chance here for Freeman to provide information to the reader which Thorndyke only unveils at the end, and, given the efforts undertaken to play almost fair while also misdirecting, it seems a shame Freeman didn’t put in the little extra effort to go the whole hog — including the details Thorndyke notes down from the manifest would hide the relevant information just as well, while also giving the reader a chance to say they were in the game as well. Sure, some information — concerning, er, atomic mass — is given, but why go that far and no further?

It’s this that makes me categorise this as the older style of story, but it’s still a clever and enjoyable example of the detective writer’s art. Not a classic, but inventive enough and a very easy way to spend your time.

Don’t make ‘The Funeral Pyre’ (1922) your first Thorndyke story, since the discovery of a dead body in a hay rick set aflame contains for most of its length little beyond the examination of footprints…difficult to get too excited about. There is, though, a very clever idea here, though again it’s needlessly obfuscated (rot13:jul abg gryy hf gur qragny cyngr vf hafgnvarq? Vgf cevfgvar pbaqvgvba pbhyq rira or pbzcnerq ntnvafg gur oheag fgngr bs gur grrgu fnyintrq sebz gur evpx…). In many ways, this is the best story in the collection, however, so don’t read that spoiler unless you’ve already finished this particular tale.

What else to say? I love how Thorndyke’s dry sense of humour comes through when Jervis, having heard his learned friend hold forth on how one might kill oneself and yet still see an insurance policy paid off, observes that it’s a good job Thorndyke is an honest man.

“I think,” [Thorndyke] retorted, “that I should find some better means of livelihood than suicide.”

There aren’t many glimpses of the character in this collection, focussed more as it is on the sheer breadth and depth of Thorndyke’s intlligence and capability, and I value them when they do peek through like this.

Overall, then Dr. Thorndyke’s Casebook (1923) is an enjoyable time without offering anything startling or exceptional. It’s arguable that these stories are only interesting because of the one-in-a-million chance on which they seem to turn, and your mileage with such developments occurring so frequently may vary, but as an example of the evolving detective story it makes a fascinating comparison with Freeman’s writing to date. There’s nothing here to win over anyone in two minds about author or character, but fans will lap it up, and it’s delightful as always to see such intelligent reasoning applied so brilliantly to such a range of problems.

There’s no point picking a best five, as I would with a longer collection, but were I to rank these I’d probably go with:

1. ‘The Funeral Pyre’ (1922)
2. ‘A Fisher of Men’ (1923)
3. ‘The Touchstone’ (1923)
4. ‘The Stolen Ingots’ (1922)
5. ‘The New Jersey Sphinx’ (1922)
6. ‘The Blue Scarab’ (1923)
7. ‘The Case of the White Footprints’ (1923)

I appreciate now that this is, essentially, a “best five”. Ha, oh well. However, it must be said that an additional sentence or a table of information here or there to increase the degree of fair play would wildly overturn this ordering, so the gulf between first and last isn’t as vast as one might suspect.

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