“Follow him!  Don’t let him escape!  He has just committed a dreadful murder!” — thus is Robert Anstey exhorted into chasing after a man he interrupts assaulting a woman on Hampstead Heath. Failing to catch his quarry, Anstey retraces his steps and discovers that Andrew Drayton, collector of knick-knacks, has indeed been shot dead in his home where Winifred Blake, the assaulted woman, had an appointment to meet him that evening. Even more curious, all Drayton’s acquisitions were well-known to be essentially valueless, so why have his gewgaws been ransacked, and what could he possibly have had amongst them that was worth killing for? Enter Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been kind of dreading this. A glance across the spines of the Dr. John Thorndyke novels and short story collections by R. Austin Freeman reveals Helen Vardon’s Confession (1922) to be his longest book by a factor of about 50%, yet Nick Fuller — who directed me so some excellent Thorndyke novels when I was new to author and character both — considers it perhaps Freeman’s worst offering. And having now read it, I can see its many problems, not least of which is a short story’s worth of criminous endeavour hiding in a 130,000 word novel that takes in too many loose ideas to warrant its tedious length. This was…not fun to read.

Sheltering from the rain while out for a walk in north London one September evening, trainee doctor Humphrey Jardine happens upon the body of a dead man, only for the corpse to have vanished by the time he is able to bring the police to the location. Before long, a discovery at the scene of this vanishing, a chance encounter with the comely Miss Sylvia Vyne, a suspicious clergyman, and the death of an elderly patient just as Jardine is about to act as locum tenens for another doctor’s practice will combine with this mobile corpse to make quite the most “astounding sequence” in young Jardine’s life, changing it forever.