The next couple of years will see me read the final few titles by a bunch of authors I’ve come to very much enjoy: I have five novels by Freeman Wills Crofts remaining, five by J.J. Connington, and now, having read Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes (1933), six by R. Austin Freeman. So my enjoyment of these books — and their later books are still proving enjoyable, though I appreciate that may not continue, with John Dickson Carr‘s work already stumbling into that slough of despond — is tinged with melancholy. It’s been such fun, and I don’t want it to end; and I especially don’t want it to end on a damp squib of turgid prose and bumbling plot mechanics.

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

Late one night, Dr. John Strangeways is summoned to tend to a woman who has clearly been strangled. Deeply unsettled by the odd encounter, he has cause to remember one of the men who was at that scene when chance brings them together in Rochester a year later. The man in question, in possession of a wicked-looking knife, does not remember the doctor, however, and Strangeways, new in town and on his way to look over a recently-vacated surgery, is relieved to be unable to help when the man asks for directions to the residence of Mrs. Frood. Deciding to take the practice on, Strangeways is in due course introduced to his landlady, and comes face to face with the strangled woman of a year before. Her name? Mrs. Angelina Frood.