Freeman, R Austin -- A Certain Dr Thorndyke (1927)

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A bit of an odd book—a Boys’ Own adventure of derring-do, mutineers, gun-running and native rebellion in the Gold Coast Colony (= Ghana, where Freeman served as doctor before being invalided home with blackwater fever), and a routine reworking of The Red Thumb Mark (theft, not murder, of jewels in a locked safe; framing of an innocent man; wax impressions, all of which have the same defect), linked fairly tenuously by the character of John Omond, the self-sacrificing, honourable, wrongly accused but eventually triumphantly vindicated hero of Victorian fiction.  This is 1897, after all.

·        West Africa—based on experiences as colonial doctor (Travels in Ashanti and Jaman).  Place where white men go to escape from past crimes, and ruin themselves with drink—Conrad.  Larkom dies of blackwater fever—which Freeman contracted.  Patronising attitude towards Africans.

·        Almost an impossible crime: how were gems stolen from sealed boxes, unless by their owner?

·        Hollis and Wampole are both collectors.

·        Examination of dust from boxes—castings of a wood-boring beetle.

·        Sea story: very popular genre in 1920s—Street, Punshon and Browne all wrote some—and Bailey?

·        Chapter 5: a very Freemanian romance—falling in love over trigonometry lessons!

·        X hit by lorry and killed.  Did he deserve this?  Only a thief, not a murderer.

·        Murderless story.

Nick Fuller.