# 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. He invented the inverted detective story (a crime fiction in which the commission of the crime is described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator, with the story then describing the detective's attempt to solve the mystery). This invention has been described as Freeman's most notable contribution to detective fiction.$^{:30}$ Freeman used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in his novels. Many of the Dr. Thorndyke stories involve genuine, but sometimes arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from areas such as tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology.

## Early life

Austin Freeman was the youngest of the five children of tailor Richard Freeman and Ann Maria Dunn. At the age of 18 he entered the medical school of the Middlesex Hospital and qualified MRCS and LSA in 1886.
After qualifying, Freeman spent a year as a house physician at the hospital. He married his childhood sweetheart Annie Elizabeth Edwards in London on 15 April 1887, and the couple later had two sons. He then entered the Colonial Service in 1887 as an assistant surgeon. He served for a time in Keta, Ghana, in 1887 during which time he dealt with an epidemic of black water fever which killed forty per cent of the European population at that port. He had six months of leave 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.
Freeman was the doctor, naturalist and surveyor for the expedition to Ashanti and Jaman, two independent states in the Gold Coast. The expedition set out from Accra on 8 December 1888, with a band consisting of a band-master and six boys playing two side drums and five fifes, three European officers (the Commissioner, Freeman and the Officer in Charge of the Constables), one Native officer, 100 Hausa constables, a gunners' party with a rocket trough, an apothecary, apothecary's assistant, a hospital orderly, and 200 bearers. The expedition went first to Kumasi (or Coolmassie as it appears in older accounts), the capital of the then independent kingdom of Ashanti. 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.
However, the expedition was a political failure as the British spokesman blurted out in front of the chiefs that the British were willing to supply a loan of £400 which the king had requested. However the King had requested this loan with the proviso that it be kept secret from his chiefs. He therefore denied any knowledge of it and the expedition moved on to Bontúku, the capital of Jaman. Here they were left cooling their heels while the King there finalised a treaty with the French, who had been quicker off the mark. The expedition was recalled after five months. Bleiler asserts, without any supporting evidence, that "It was mostly through Freeman's intelligence and tact that the expedition was not massacred". Although the mission overall was a failure, the collection of data by Freeman was a success, and his future in the colonial service seemed assured. 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.

## Career

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. He was in general practice in London for about five years. He was appointed acting Deputy Medical Officer of Holloway Prison in about 1901, and Acting Assistant Medical Officer of the Port of London in 1904. A year later he suffered a complete breakdown in his health and gave up medicine for writing.
His first successful stories were the Romney Pringle rogue stories written in collaboration with John James Pitcairn (1860–1936), medical officer at Holloway Prison. 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.
In 1905 Freeman published his first solo novel, The Golden Pool, with the background drawn from his own time in West Africa. The protagonist is a young Englishman who steals a fetish treasure. Barzun and Taylor make the point that while this is a crime, the book was not regarded as crime fiction as "according to old notions" stealing things from Africans "is no crime". 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."
Freeman's first Thorndyke story, The Red Thumb Mark, was published in 1907, and shortly afterwards he pioneered the inverted detective story, in which the identity of the criminal is shown from the beginning. Some short stories with this feature were collected in The Singing Bone in 1912. During the First World War, he served as an induction physician and a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and afterwards produced a Thorndyke novel almost every year until his death in 1943.

## Later life

Freeman briefly stopped writing at the outbreak of the Second World War, but then resumed writing in an air-raid shelter he had built in his garden. Freeman was plagued by Parkinson's disease in his later years. 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", and The Jacob Street Mystery (1942) in which Roberts considers that Thorndyke "is at his analytical best."$^{:32-33}$ He was living at 94, Windmill Street, Gravesend, Kent when he died on 28 September 1943. His estate was valued at £6,471 5s 11d. Freeman was buried in the old Gravesend and Milton Cemetery at Gravesend. The Thorndyke File started a funding drive to erect a granite marker for Freeman's grave, and this was erected in September 1979, with the text: Richard Austin Freeman, 1862 – 1943, Physician and Author, Erected by the friends of "Dr. Thorndyke", 1979.

## Political views

Freeman held conservative political views. 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". Freeman supported the eugenics movement and argued that people with "undesirable" biological traits should be prevented from breeding through "segregation, marriage restriction, and sterilization". The book also attacked the British Labour movement and criticised the British government for permitting immigrants (whom Freeman referred to as "Sub-Man") to settle in Britain. Social Decay and Regeneration referred to the Russian Revolution as "the Russian catastrophe" and argued that society needed to protected from "degenerates of the destructive or "Bolshevik type." Sections of Social Decay and Regeneration were reprinted in Eugenics Review, the journal of the British Eugenics Society.

## Anti-Semitism

Freeman's views on Jewish people were complex stereotypes. They are clearly set out in his eugenicist book Social Decay and Regeneration (1921). Here Freeman states that of vulgarity "the only ancient peoples who exhibited it on an appreciable scale were the Jews and especially the Phoenician." Freeman notes that a large proportion of the "Alien Unfit" crowding the East End of London, "largely natives of Eastern Europe" are Jews. However, the criticism is of the poor rather than of Jews overall as these unfit aliens were "far from being the elect of their respective races". 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". Not surprisingly, some of these views spill over into his fiction.
Grost states that Helen Vardon's Confession (1922) "is another bad Freeman novel suffering from offensive racial stereotypes". 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. Otway acts in bad faith, and is grasping, keeping only one servant despite his great wealth. The whole plot is a gratuitously offensive anti-Semitic stereotype. 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". However, the villain is not Jewish at all, and the only question of stereotypes comes up in the questions about whether the villain's (false) hooked nose is "a curved Jewish type, or a squarer Roman nose?" There are no anti-Semitic tropes in the book, no grasping money-lender etc. Grost describes Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke (1931), as degenerating into "another of Freeman's anti-Semitic diatribes". In this novel the villains are largely Jewish, and come from the community of "unfit aliens" that Freeman lambastes in Social Decay and Regeneration.
Such offensive representations of Jews in fiction were typical of the time. Rubinstein and Jolles note that while the work of many of the leading detective story writers, such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Freeman, featured many gratuitously negative depictions of stereotyped Jewish characters, this ended with the rise of Hitler, and they then portrayed Jews and Jewish refugees in a sympathetic light. Thus with Freeman, the later novels no longer present such gratuitously offensive racial stereotypes, but present Jews much more positively.
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'". In The Stoneware Monkey (1938), Thorndyke is using a young Jewish man as his messenger. In Mr Polton Explains (1938), Polton is assisted first by the Jewish watchmaker Abraham and then by the Jewish solicitor Cohen, who comes to Polton's aid not once but twice, not only representing him without cost, but feeding him and lending him money without interest or term.

## Critical assessment

Freeman was a significant author of detective fiction in his day. He was most famous for his creation of Dr. Thorndyke, and many of the obituaries recording his death referred to this in the headlines. Thus the Birmingham Daily Gazette announced "'Dr. Thorndyke' Creator Dead", the Belfast News-Letter announced "Obituary Dr. R. A. Freeman, Creator of 'Dr. Thorndyke'", and the Evening Star (Dunedin) announced "Obituary: Creator of Dr. Thorndyke".
Critical comment has tended to concentrate on four aspects of Thorndyke: Freeman's quality as a writer; the close attention to logic, scientific accuracy and methods in his stories; the invention of the inverted detective story; and comparisons with Sherlock Holmes. The Times considered that the second and third of these were what singled Freeman "out from the ruck".

### Writing

In Bloody Murder, Julian Symons wrote that Freeman's "... talents as a writer were negligible. Reading a Freeman story is very much like chewing dry straw." Symons then went on to criticise the way in which Thorndyke spoke. De Blacam also noted Thorndyke's "ponderous legal phraseology". However, that pedantic ponderousness is the nature of Thorndyke's character. He is a barrister and used to weighing his words carefully. He never discusses his analysis until he has built the whole picture. Others do not agree with his assessment of Freeman's writing skills. Raymond Chandler, in a 13 December 1949 letter to Hamish Hamilton said: "This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. 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."
Binyon also rates Freeman's writing as inferior to Doyle saying "Thorndyke might be the superior detective, Conan Doyle is undeniably the better writer." The Birmingham Daily Post considered that "Mr. Austin Freeman was not, perhaps, among the finer artists of the short story, and his longer stories could limp, sometimes" but that his approach was very effective.
However, de Blacam makes the point that, quite apart from the description of the investigation, each of the descriptions of the crimes in the inverted stories "was a fine piece of descriptive writing". Grost agrees that "Freeman's descriptive writing is excellent" Adey finds that: "Freeman's writing, though lacking Doyle's atmospheric touch, was clear and concise, with dry humor and a keen eye for deductive detail." Adams agreed that Freeman had considerable powers of narrative description when he stated that "Nothing but the author's remarkable skill in character delineation and graphic narrative" could save his stories from being regarded as technical studies for a course on forensic medicine.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Bleiler noted in 1973 that Freeman "... is one of the very few Edwardian detective story writers who are still read".

### The inverted story

Nowadays, the inverted detective story, where we first witness the crime and then watch the attempt to solve it, is commonplace. For example, this is the format of almost every episode of the television detective series Columbo starring Peter Falk. However, this approach was an innovation in November 1910 when Freeman's "Oscar Brodski" appeared in Pearson's Magazine. and immediately attracted attention. The Northern Whig said that "Oscar Brodski" was "one of the most powerful detective stories we have ever read". Bleiler said that this story "has always been considered one of the landmarks in the history of the detective story".
In his essay The Art of the Detective Story Freeman wrote that in the inverted story: "The reader had seen the crime committed, knew all about the criminal, and was in possession of all the facts. It would have seemed that there was nothing left to tell, but I calculated that the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the evidence. And so it turned out. The second part, which described the investigation of the crime, had to most readers the effect of new matter." However, Binyon notes that Freeman is being too modest here, and that it was Freeman's art that kept the reader's attention in the second part.
Reviewers approved of Freeman's inverted tales. 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". 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".$^{:30-32}$

### Precision of logic, facts, and method

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. He also went to the trouble of visiting the places he wrote about so that the details in his descriptions were correct. De Balcam says that "Freeman displays a mastery of craftsmanship" in every story, and that he always used the language of the trade concerned. Freeman is "a man who writes of things that he has seen, handled and understood, and not of things that he has met only in print, or in a hazy, inattentive observation". This is a critical aspect of Freeman - he tested the methods he used. The top floor of his house was a workshop and laboratory, and his books sometimes included drawings or micrographs 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.
The Birmingham Post noted that his attention to forensic science was fuller and "certainly more systematically than any other writer of detective stories" and that the accuracy of his stories gained him "an exceptionally large proportion of readers of the more exacting and less easily satisfied type".
On logic Adams stated that to read Freeman's cases intelligently "... implies a definite exercise in the use of 'Mill's Canons of Inductive Logic'" and the books offered a very practical means of testing students' understanding of the canons. Herbert notes that Thorndyke's reasoning "... is distinguished by its rigorous logic". Thorndyke, like his creator, was a medical man and also a barrister, and "combined his legal and medical training into a personage of willful dominance, impeccable logic, and scholarly and comprehensive inductive reasoning".$^{:27}$

### Comparisons with Sherlock Holmes

Inevitably, commentators compared Thorndyke with Holmes. 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. "Thorndyke is the most impressive and the most intellectually powerful of fictional detectives." Poupard notes that "In critical comparisons with Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke is deemed the more accurate thinker and ranked superior as a scientific authority, whereas Holmes is considered the superior literary creation". One immediate clue to the difference between Thorndyke and Holmes, is that Holmes calls his inductive reasoning deduction, a mistake that Thorndyke would never make. Binyon notes that Holmes often makes factual errors, referring to the blue carbuncle as crystallised charcoal, when it contains no carbon, and referring to non-existent species or martial arts.
Ward compares how Holmes deals with a hat as a clue in Doyle's short story The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892) with how Thorndyke treats a similar clue in Freeman's short story The Anthropologist at Large (1909). After examining the hat, Holmes declares that:
* The man is intellectual – as he has a large head size.
* That he was once well to do, but is no longer – as the hat was an expensive style from three years ago that is now shabby.
* That he was a man of foresight, but has suffered moral retrogression, probably due to drink – as the hat has had a safety guard fitted to it, but the owner has failed to renew the elastic.
* That he is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which had recently been cut and that he used lime cream – from an examination of the lining
* That his wife has ceased to love him – as the hat has not been brushed for weeks (there is other evidence that he is married).
* That he probably does not have town-gas in his house – as there are several tallow stains, presumably from guttering candles, on the hat.
For his part, the first observation that Thorndyke makes is that hats often change owners over their lives, so one needs to interpret the evidence with caution. This immediately explodes at least the second and third of Holmes's conclusions. Thorndyke then induces that:
* The man is Japanese – from the shape of the head, as the hat has clearly been steamed to fit a particular head, and from a hair sample, which matches Japanese rather than European or African hair.
* That he works at a mother of pearl factory – due to the large amount of pearl shell dust inside the hat. At the time, this business was largely carried out by Japanese and Chinese immigrants.
* That he is a decent orderly man – as there is no accumulation of dust on the outside of his hat.
Ward notes that Thorndyke's conclusions are sound, less capricious, and more practical, and allow Thorndyke to track his man down, whereas Holmes has to advertise to find his.
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".