Freeman, R Austin - Dr Thorndyke's Casebook / The Blue Scarab (1923)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

Unlike the casebook of his illustrious older brother, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Thorndyke’s casebook is a strong collection. In these seven stories the lecturer in medical jurisprudence, accompanied by his chronicler Jervis, investigates a series of problems: three murders, of which the last, "The Funeral Pyre", with its body in a hayrick identified by its false teeth (c.f. "In the Teeth of the Evidence" and Dead Man’s Effects, as well as "Superintendent Wilson’s Holiday", which also concerns vanishing businessmen on the coast and a confusion of footprints) and really good clue of a clean dental plate and clay pipes, is the best. "The Case of the White Footprints" involves a murderer without any little toes, which Dr Jervis puts down to ergotism or frost bite – Thorndyke realises that it is a symptom of an obscure disease (ainhum) and hence identifies the criminal. The weakest is certainly "The New Jersey Sphinx", which features one of Freeman’s murderers with thyroid problems who rushes around trying to incriminate and impersonate others, even though unaware that Thorndyke is on his trail. The other four tales all concern thefts – of "The Blue Scarab", which, like Poe’s "Gold Bug", holds the key to a buried treasure and an old skeleton; of a will in "The Touchstone"; a necklace in "A Fisher of Men" and, in the dullest of the lot, "The Stolen Ingots". As always, the detection is as interesting as the solution, as Thorndyke uses his knowledge of medical conditions, hieroglyphs, dust particles, natural history and the specific gravity of metal to solve seven ingenious cases.