Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke is a fictional detective in a long series of 21 novels and 40 short stories by British author R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943).

His solutions were based on his method of collecting all possible data (including dust and pond weed) and making inferences from them before looking at any of the protagonists and motives in the crimes.

Then he got called to the Bar with an eye to getting an appointment as coroner, but the lecturer on Medical Jurisprudence at St Margaret's retired unexpectedly, and Thorndyke applied for the vacant post.

[7] He was often assisted by his friend and foil Christopher Jervis, who usually acts as narrator, and always by the resourceful Nathaniel Polton, his crinkly-faced lab technician.

[8] Thorndyke tended to have a better relationship with the police (usually in the form of Superintendent Miller) than Sherlock Holmes did, despite proving them wrong on numerous occasions.

In a professional sense he may have been suggested to me by Dr. Alfred Swayne Taylor... but his personality was designed in accordance with certain principles and what I believed to be the probabilities as to what such a man would be like".

The story revolves in part around the Thumbograph (actually called the Thumb o'Graphs as in autographs), a booklet in which people could collect fingerprints.

Thus Leadbeatter faulted Thorndyke for excluding the possibility that the odontoid process (a small bone in the neck) of a corpse had been broken by the collapse of the house during the fire in Mr Polton Explains.

A modern publisher, Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, issued a 9-volume edition of the complete works of R. Austin Freeman, including all the Thorndyke novels and short stories, with additional volumes of commentary and criticism.

Volume 10 of the collection was a revised edition (1998) of In search of Dr. Thorndyke: The story of R. Austin Freeman's great scientific investigator and his creator (originally published 1971) by Norman Donaldson.

Delphi Classics have issued a Complete Works of R. Austin Freeman, but this is not for sale in the United States due to copyright reasons.

[17] John Thorndyke's cases, supposedly related by Christopher Jervis and edited by Richard Austin Freeman first appeared as serial stories in Pearson's Magazine in 1908.

[citation needed] On June 9, 1962, Mollie Hardwick adapted Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes as The Corpse in the Case[20] on Saturday Night Theatre for the BBC Home Service.

On September 14, 1963, Mollie Hardwick adapted Mr. Pottermack's Oversight on Saturday Night Theatre for the BBC Home Service in the series Murder for Pleasure.