You have to buy the whole book of A Certain Dr. Thorndyke (1927), the tenth novel featuring R. Austin Freeman’s eponymous, esteemed medical jurist, but I’d advise only reading half of it. Rather like final Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear (1915) by Arthur Conan Doyle, the story here is split into two parts, one of criminous shenanigans and one of tedious backstory — though Freeman’s backstory comes first — and, even then, the crime and its investigation are only just about interesting to hold the attention. Mostly this smells of an idea Freeman couldn’t let go that should have been at best a novella, but which finds itself beefed up so that he could fulfil a clause in a contract. He does so enthusiastically, but it’s not a good read.

The first half, then, concerns the story of John Osmond, hiding out in Adaffia, somewhere on the “Slave Coast” in Africa, no doubt drawing on Freeman’s own experiences in West Africa before illness saw him shipped home. Alas, despite our author’s knowledge of the people and place whereof he writes, there’s a lot of century-old language and attitudes which don’t exactly endear this to the reader of 2025. That, though, is then cast aside as this becomes a sort of hijinx on the high seas tale which, as Nick Fuller points out, would have been popular at the time but sits oddly against the tale of common sense reasoning this is to become. Honestly, I could probably have just about put up with a full novel of Osmond at sea, given the inventive way he overcomes his difficulties — chapter 4, ‘The Phantom Mate’, is very entertaining — but this palled since I knew it wasn’t going to be the eventual focus of the story.

The second half sees us back in London, and Thorndyke consulted when some jewels go missing in sort-of-but-not-really impossible circumstances, with it transpiring — and, look, mild spoilers, but the book’s hardly exciting enough to get too invested in, and I say that as a big fan of this series — that Osmond is suspected of the theft. And so Thorndyke takes it upon himself to investigate the boxes, sealed with paper and string and wax, from which these baffling vanishments have occurred:

“Your methods, Dr. Thorndyke,” said [Mr. Penfield], “are a perennial source of wonder to me. May I ask what kind of information you expect to extract from the empty boxes?”

“I have no specific expectations at all,” was the reply; “but it will be strange indeed if we learn nothing from them. They will probably have little enough to tell us; but, seeing that we have, at present, hardly a single fact beyond that of the substitution — and that is not of our own observing — a very small addition to our knowledge would be all to the good.”

This, of course, is one of the many reasons we love Thorndyke, because his refusal to take anything at face value makes him one of the most brilliant and imaginative investigators in the hallowed halls of detective fiction. The usual care with which he approaches every step is always delightful to witness, and the additional mystery of why someone would go to such lengths to steal some of these jewels which are barely worth more than the fakes with which they have been substituted adds a layer of intrigue.

It is, though, pretty thin beer beyond that. If you can’t possibly imagine how the jewels were taken, and if you similarly fail to spot the real culprit — oh, spoilers, I suppose, since Osmond isn’t guilty — then, well, you have some wonderful years ahead of you reading and being surprised by practically every detective story ever written. There’s no added intrigue which requires Thorndyke to bring his brilliant intellect to bear, he just works through things slowly, unravels a hardly-difficult-to-foresee plot, and finds the guilty party by it being the only person who fulfils the necessary requirements (although they are all but wearing a hat with I DUNNIT HA HA AND I REGRET NOTHING!! on it throughout).

Er, what else to tell you? This feels lifeless in the way that so little Freeman has before now, with no clever death traps to deter our sleuth, no ingenious problems or multi-stage fathoming needed; it’s the simplest case since Thorndyke’s debut, and that only really needed its opening and closing chapters to make everything clear. That’s not quite true here, but it would all boil down to a moderately forgettable novella if you took out the opening half, and you wouldn’t even miss the time spent in the Thorndyke ménage, since that’s curiously airless this time around, too. But, well, everyone has an off day, and the next two novels Freeman would write after this — As a Thief in the Night (1928) and Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight (1930) — are among the very best I’ve so far encountered from him, which puts them near the peak of the form for their respective decades, so clearly the experience of this counted for something.

We want our favoured authors to be wonderful every time, of course, but that’s far from achievable in reality, and so the only sensible action is to simply be grateful that the sort of disappointment represented here makes up by far the minority of their published work. Those of you looking to experience Freeman and Thorndyke at their most engaging can avoid this for all sorts of reasons, and anyone else who insists on reading it anyway will have doubtless built up enough goodwill for the series that it’s not going to shake their foundations of trust. Call it a bump in the road, and look forward to better in the onward journey

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