R. Austin Freeman
Dr. Richard Austin Freeman MRCS LSA (11 April 1862 – 28 September 1943) was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr. Thorndyke.
Many of the Dr. Thorndyke stories involve genuine, but sometimes arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from areas such as tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology.
[5] He had six months of leave[note 2] from mid 1888 and returned to Accra on the Gold Coast just in time to volunteer for the post of medical officer on the planned expedition to Ashanti and Jaman.
[6] Freeman was the doctor, naturalist and surveyor[note 3] for the expedition to Ashanti and Jaman, two independent states in the Gold Coast.
Their second port of call was Bondoukou, Ivory Coast, where they arrived only to find that the king had just signed a protectorate treaty with the French.
Unfortunately, he became ill with blackwater fever and was invalided home in 1891, being discharged from the service two months before the minimum qualification period for a pension.
[4] Thus, he returned to London in 1891, and around 1892 served as temporary Acting Surgeon in Charge of the Throat and Ear Department at Middlesex Hospital.
Some were published first in Australia, under the joint pen name of Ralph J. Jay, and all of them were serialised under another pseudonym, "Clifford Ashdown" in Cassell's Magazine in 1902 and 1903.
[14][note 6] Bleiler wrote that "it is a colorful, thrilling story, all the more unusual in being ethnographically accurate" and that "it used to be required reading for members of the British colonial services in Africa.
During the First World War, he served as an induction physician[13] and a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and afterwards produced a Thorndyke novel almost every year until his death in 1943.
[17] This makes his achievement all the more remarkable, as in his declining years he wrote both Mr. Polton Explains, which Bleiler says "... is in some ways his best novel",[10] and The Jacob Street Mystery (1942) in which Roberts considers that Thorndyke "is at his analytical best.
[25] In his 1921 book Social Decay and Regeneration Freeman put forth the view that mechanization had flooded Britain with poor-quality goods and created a "homogenized, restless, unionized working class".
[25] Freeman supported the eugenics movement and argued that people with "undesirable" biological traits should be prevented from breeding through "segregation, marriage restriction, and sterilization".
[30] Freeman regards that, through restricting marriage with non-Jews, Jews as having practised racial segregation "for thousands of years with the greatest success and with very evident benefit to the race".
[32] Helen Vardon is blackmailed into marrying the fat, old, money-lender Otway, who was "distinctly Semitic in appearance", and is surrounded by Jews, to save her father from prison.
[citation needed] Grost also states that the use of racial stereotypes in The D'Arblay Mystery (1926) "marks it as a low point in Freeman's fiction".
In this novel the villains are largely Jewish, and come from the community of "unfit aliens" that Freeman lambastes in Social Decay and Regeneration.
In When Rogues Fall Out (1932) Mr. Toke describes the Jewish cabinetmaker Levy as "A most excellent workman and a thoroughly honest man", high praise from Freeman's pen.
The counsel for Dolby the burglar, "a good-looking Jew named Lyon" executes a particularly brilliant defence of his client which Thorndyke admires.
In Felo de Se; or Death at the Inn (1937) the croupier is described as "a pleasant-faced Jew, calm, impassive and courteous, though obviously very much 'on the spot'".
He has no equal in his genre and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected.
The Scotsman said that Freeman had "... proved that a tale which tells the story of the crime first, leaving us to follow the sleuth as he tracks the criminal down, may be at least as absorbing as the old yarns which left us in the dark until the end".
[49] Rodgers noted that "Great narrative skill is needed in order to keep the reader's interest" in a story where the crime if revealed at that start and that there have been imitators "Freeman alone stands as not only the originator, but as the most successful proponent of this form of detective fiction".
[1]: 30-32 Freeman paid a great deal of attention to details, and carried out the experiments described in his books to ensure that they worked and would give the expected results.
The top floor of his house was a workshop and laboratory,[51] and his books sometimes included drawings or micrographs[note 9] illustrating the evidence.
One instance that shows that the methods and approaches described by Freeman were practicable lies in the prosecution of an apprentice from Barrow for coining.
The apprentice had followed a method described in one of the Danby Croker stories by Freeman, and had produced a number of sovereigns that he had successfully passed.
Binyon says that Thorndyke stands out from the other late Victorian and early Edwardian detectives in being a rival to Sherlock Holmes, rather than just owing their existence to his success.
[58] Herbert notes that in comparison to Holmes, "Thorndyke has no eccentricities, and his reasoning, unlike that of his contemporary, is distinguished by its rigorous logic – considered purely as a detective, he is perhaps the most impressive of all fictional sleuths".
