Prior to reading For the Defence: Dr. Thorndyke (1934), the sixteenth novel featuring R. Austin Freeman’s eponymous esteemed medical jurist, the honour of Most Ridiculous Opening to a Book I’ve Read belonged to thriller The Day After Tomorrow (1994) by Allan Folsom. To Folsom’s credit, that book is pretty insane the whole way through, and he drops the opening few lines on you quickly and then moves on at a superb pace. Freeman’s novel, by comparison, takes Folsom’s cake and bakes it several times over, using its first five chapters to patiently build in classic Freeman style towards the pitch of its true insanity, and doing it all with a straight face.

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