A Silent Witness : A Dr. Thorndyke Mystery by R. Austin Freeman

Before forensic science became the foundation of modern criminal investigation, Dr. John Thorndyke was solving mysteries through meticulous observation, scientific reasoning, and careful attention to physical evidence. In A Silent Witness, celebrated mystery writer R. Austin Freeman presents another ingenious case for his pioneering detective, whose methodical approach would influence generations of crime fiction.

Richard Austin Freeman was born in Soho, London in 1862, and after he turned 18 years old, he qualified for medical school at Middlesex Hospital and spent a year as a house physician. He joined the Colonial Service as an assistant surgeon in 1887, with seemingly a lot of medical experience for someone his age.

If you assumed that Colonial Service implied colonization, you would be correct. Freeman spent time in Ghana, Africa, and worked as a doctor, surveyor, and naturalist on “expeditions” to Jaman and Ashanti, two independent states that now make up current-day Ghana. Unfortunately for Freeman, he eventually caught something nasty called blackwater fever, and was discharged from the service by 1891.

Once he was back in London, he went back to work as a doctor at Middlesex Hospital and by 1905, he had encountered enough mental health issue that made him give up medicine for writing.

He quickly published his first novel The Golden Pool In 1905, utilizing his experience in West Africa, and published his first Dr. Thorndyke story The Red Thumb Mark in 1907. He would be so known for this character that it headlined his obituaries, often implementing his medical knowledge into his stories.

Freeman was also the dude who came up with the concept of the inverted detective story — where the audience learns who did it at the beginning — that’s been a narrative device by crime fiction in popular media ever since. First used in his short story “The Case of Oskar Brodski” that was published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1912, that device has been used in Alfred Hitchcock movies and the popular television show Columbo.

As you might expect from a guy with a couple years of colonizing under his belt as a young man, Freeman had some problematic viewpoints on things like eugenics and Jewish people, and even published a problematic book about it called Social Decay and Regeneration in 1921. But he mostly known as a pretty prolific author of detective novels and was seen as a kind of a poor man’s Arthur Conan Doyle.

Freeman’s reviews among critics were mixed. British crime writer Julian Symons said that reading a Freeman story is like chewing dry straw. Laurence Binyon was another British scholar who said that Conan Doyle was “undeniably the better writer.” Raymond Chandler, though, was a big fan. He once told a publishing company that “Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer” who “has no equal in his genre.”

In 1973, this scholar of genre fiction dude E.F. Bleiler said that R. Austin Freeman is “one of the very few Edwardian detective story writers who are still read” and while we do not know how true that is in the 21st century, Freeman should be remembered as a groundbreaking detective writer just the same.

Click on the cover to buy A Silent Witness by R. Austin Freeman!

Cover Image Credit: Background image of Middlesex Hospital is circa 1908 and authored by the Middlesex Hospital Marketing Department. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license per Wikimedia Commons. The original cover image is an illustration by H. Weston Taylor from the 1915 publication of A Silent Witness by R. Austin Freeman and is also part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. It has been cropped and resized and colorized to create the cover.

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