One sympathises with Martin Edwards when he says that he found the style of the opening pages of Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke (1931), the nineteenth book and thirteenth novel by R. Austin Freeman to feature medical jurist Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, “off-putting”. I am an avowed Freeman fan, this being the 19th book by him I have read, and I nearly quit on page 2. But if you persevere, dear reader, you’ll find an interesting story with some very, very good detection indeed that definitely improves once Freeman curbs his initial pomposity…though the book as a whole does suffer slightly from an absence of content to fill out the closing few chapters

Told from two perspectives, this follows first 17 year-old delivery boy Jasper Gray who, upon being asked to deliver a crate of eggs, find himself drawn into a shady underworld when his cargo turns out to be something quite different. Taken hostage, he escapes, aiding another hostage in the process — a beautiful young woman, of course — and then resumes his life as if nothing has befallen him. Parallel to his continued adventures, we get a narrative from Thorndyke’s most frequent Watson, Dr. Christopher Jervis, as the two gentlemen are drawn into an apparent suicide and the matter of an entail. And it is not exactly to the book’s credit that how these two threads will collide is obvious from, like, chapter three.

In the meantime, however, there is the usual joy to be found in Thorndyke’s characteristically rigorous examination of both the body of our suicide and the scene where the body was found. Of course there is a moderate amount of good fortune — that the weather held off, for one — but one of the real excitements of this series is for me when Thorndyke makes a string of elementary observations, as here, and then concludes with a near-certainty “that we are justified in assuming with considerable confidence that these [marks] were made on the night of Sunday, the twenty-first of June, probably after ten o’clock”. Those wishing to study detection in its purest form really should read their Thorndyke.

One of the things I particularly relish about these books is that Jervis is no mere dullard himself, and, while it often takes Thorndyke to point out the facts, he is able to give a summary that is both succinct and exhaustive without his friendly genius looking at him in a pitying way and trying to find a new way to say “You have seen but you have not observed…”. The trope of the Idiot Friend got a good airing in the Golden Age, but Freeman is true to these men as intelligent, observant, and capable professionals in their own right; in an age where we’re increasingly passing off any form of thinking to A.I. or simply assuming that someone else will come in and do the hard work for us as a race, I find Jervis a breath of fresh air.

Freeman trusts his audience, too, with some remarkably clear-sighted explanations of some very complex topics. The discussion of hereditary traits in chapter thirteen is glorious, and it’s only to be wished that Freeman has been perhaps a little more obscure in his plotting so that the eventual thrust of things remained more hidden to the reader. Indeed, it’s a shame that serendipity is so busy in this book because, if you took out the sections with Jasper Gray, there’s a magnificent detective story here that, with a little more care, could easily have been among the best things Freeman ever wrote. Although, given our author, and sleuth, demonstrate such cautious acceptance of circumstantial evidence — clearly a fixation for certain Golden Age authors, and rightly so — it would have more power if what seemed obvious was in some way overturned in the final 50 pages instead of slowly, almost to the point of tedium, proving Thorndyke correct.

Still, the humanity of the characters remains palpable, as in all Freeman’s work, such as when Thordyke, Jervis, and the lawyer Brodribb are to go and formally identify the body of our dead man:

Mr. Brodribb shuddered audibly, and, as I observed that he had taken Thorndyke’s arm, I suddenly realised that what was for me and my colleague a matter of mere daily routine was to our poor old friend a really distressing and horrible experience.

And, lo, that wonderful thing: at last, a Golden Age novel that has a problem with people marrying their cousins!

I was interested, and a little dismayed, then, to see the erudite reviewer Mike Grost dismiss this as an “anti-Semitic diatribe”. It’s true that Brodribb voices the possibility that a man’s wife may be “a Russian woman of some sort — maybe a Jewess for all I know”, but Thorndyke immediately comments that “we mustn’t be too insular, you know…even if she should be a Jewess, surely you would not deny that she would belong to a very distinguished and gifted race”. Beyond that, unless I’m being especially dense, I don’t see what ground there are for Grost’s interpretation — some phonetic speech on behalf of Russian nationals, and Jasper Gray’s pursuit through a neighbourhood told in almost horror-adjacent language, maybe? These House of Stratus editions contain the unedited text and far as I know, so I am a little confused.

I can sympathise with Freeman wishing to change up how he structured his narratives — A Certain Dr. Thorndyke (1927) was split into two separate parts, one without our good doctor — but here he seems to have squandered a fabulous story by dipping too much into the other side of events. One for completists, perhaps, but equally you could just read the Jervis chapters and see some of the firmest detectival delights of the Golden Age in full flight. The choice is yours…

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