Freeman, R Austin - John Thorndyke's Cases (1909) aka Dr Thorndyke's Cases

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

THE MAN WITH THE NAILED SHOES

The Sergeant’s Sketch of Footprints; Plan of St. Bridget’s Bay

Jervis is acting as a junior in the seaside village of Little Sundersley, while Thorndyke (not yet his employer) is his guest, and so is on hand to look into the footprints of the man with the nailed shoes left on the beach by the murderer, and so expose a forgery and frame-up in order to prevent a miscarriage of justice.

THE STRANGER’S LATCHKEY

The fluff from the key barrel (of which a slide is given), footprints and tyre tracks are the clues that put Thorndyke onto the trail of the wicked uncle who kidnapped his nephew, rather than more sensibly murdering him. Pleasant enough, but not outstanding.

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AT LARGE

From scientific analysis of the hat found at the scene of the crime, Thorndyke is able to build up a profile (hairs, dust, cephalic index—racial characteristics) of the man who burgled Isaac Löwe’s house.

THE BLUE SEQUIN

The blue sequin is the crucial clue that allows Dr. Thorndyke to prove the young man innocent of murdering his former mistress on the trail. Solution anti-climactic.

THE MOABITE CIPHER

The Professor’s Analysis of Cryptogram

A tale that is fast-moving and full of interest—until the end, when the reader realises that he has been unfairly hoodwinked, and will, like Professor P., “regard… the inscription with profound disfavour.” Noteworthy for one of the worst metaphors in detective fiction: “Don’t attempt to suck my brain when you have an excellent brain of your own to suck.” Yuck!

THE MANDARIN’S PEARL

Despite some vulgarity unusual for Freeman, this is an ingenious plot with some similarities to Bailey’s “Only Son”, involving the death of a neurotic young man who purchased a pearl whose previous owners all apparently committed suicide. Too few suspects for adequate mystification, though.

THE ALUMINIUM DAGGER

One of the few soberly handled locked-room murders, without the romantic trappings of Carr and Chesterton. The investigation is typically detailed, and the method, similar to those Carr used in The Peacock Feather Murders and The Judas Window, is very neat and efficient.

A MESSAGE FROM THE DEEP SEA

The Sand from the Murdered Woman’s Pillow, Magnified 25 Diameters; Human Hair, showing Roots.

Almost pure Thorndykean analysis, and typically excellent at that: the foraminifera on the victim’s pillow and an examination of the hair roots enable Dr. Thorndyke to prove the young woman innocent of murdering her mother’s lodger. Pleasingly free from anti-Semitism.

"A Message From the Deep Sea" is a straightforward tale, showing how Thorndyke's scientific analysis of a crime scene leads to the identification of the killer. It concludes with Thorndyke's (and Freeman's) plea for all crime scenes in real life to be scientifically investigated. In 1909 this must have been a revolutionary thought. The final plea is especially beautifully written, and is a classic passage in Freeman's work. Some other notes: the stories' setting among immigrant Jews in London continues the Realist School's interest in racial minorities. The title of the story refers to the marine creatures known as Foraminifera, whose minute, microscopic shells are found in some sand on the victim's pillow. Thorndyke's deductions here anticipate Freeman's later work in "A Wastrel's Romance", where he gave a similar theme a definitive treatment. Freeman is one of the few artists in any media to be interested in the microscopic world.

Ermanno Olmi's film masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) has the great scene where the little boy tells his parents about microscopic animals. Today there are superb atlases of electron microscope photographs that show detail that was undreamed of in Freeman's day, for example Jeremy Pickett-Heaps' classic on the Green Algae (1975), David Scharf's Magnifications (1977), which shows both insects and plants, B.G. Butterfield and B.A.Meylan's Three-Dimensional Structure of Wood (1980), Kerry L. O'Donnell's fungi study Zygomycetes in Culture (1979), Peter Parks' The World You Never See, Underwater Life (1976), Gary T. Cole and Robert A. Samson's Patterns of Development in Conidial Fungi (1979), C.G. Ogden and R.H. Hodley's An Atlas of Freshwater Testate Amoebae (1980), David Ledbetter Nanney's Experimental Ciliatology (1980), and I.K. Ferguson and J. Muller's The Evolutionary Significance of the Exine (1976), which looks at pollen. I keep thinking that such works will become favorites with the general public, but so far only scientists seem to look at them much. Readers can find these works in University science libraries. Such books admit readers to a land of wonder only equaled by the Arabian Nights. If you've never seen them, you are only half alive.

"The Mandarin's Pearl" is a classic impossible crime tale. The basic idea is similar to one used on an episode of the early 1960's TV series Checkmate; I saw it as a child and it made a deep impression. Checkmate was created by spy writer Eric Ambler, who also sometimes wrote and produced it. Another story from John Thorndyke's Cases (collected 1909), "The Aluminum Dagger", is also an early impossible crime work.

"The Mandarin's Pearl" shows Freeman's fascination with means of seeing. Freeman includes every possible optical device in his stories; this one deals with mirrors. In other tales, Freeman includes photography, motion pictures, serial photography (in Mr Pottermack's Oversight), microscopes, the chemistry enhanced vision of "The Moabite Cipher", and many stories about painters, sculptors and craftsmen. Freeman was also a pioneer of multimedia, including photographic illustrations to the original magazine publication of John Thorndyke's Cases, and to The Stoneware Monkey, according to Norman Donaldson's biography. Freeman's interest in molds and casting seems related to this. Freeman was especially interested in the way casting could duplicate an image, the way photography can. The climactic moment in any Freeman story about molds in when the cast is finished, and the hero sees that the cast is an exact visual duplicate of the original. Like photography, casting allows Freeman to own an image, to make a copy of something he has seen, and hold it in his hand. Similarly, Freeman's stories about painting stress its ability to realistically duplicate something the painter has seen. Freeman is mainly interested in landscape and portraiture, which perform such duplication.

"The Man in the Nailed Boots" and "The Stranger's Latchkey" constitute a dissertation about footprints, giving an in-depth look at what can be deduced from them. Both stories are of interest when discussing prints and other evidence, but both also suffer from lots of less interesting story material, such as a long flashback in "The Man in the Nailed Boots". "The Man in the Nailed Boots" shows how footprints can be faked, just as The Red Thumb Mark (1907) and "The Old Lag" (1909) deal with the faking of fingerprints, and "A Case of Premeditation" lays false trails to deceive bloodhounds. Such faking of evidence was a subject of great interest to Freeman in these works, all from a narrow range of years around 1907-1911. But they seem of only minor interest to this reader. Most of these tales skimp on actual mystery elements, unfortunately, concentrating instead on pure technical questions. Freeman will return more poetically and imaginatively to subject of faked footprints in parts of Mr Pottermack's Oversight (1930).

"The Stranger's Latchkey" has a sinister disappearance in a wooded park-like area. Freeman will develop a richer look at such a setting in his final novel, The Jacob Street Mystery (1942). So while neither "The Man in the Nailed Boots" and "The Stranger's Latchkey" are peak achievements for Freeman, both do contain seeds of later, more developed works.

Mike Grost

The book is very handsome.  See the cover at ABE:   http://tinyurl.com/cca2m2

It contains about 5 line drawings within the text, and ten inserted plates (the title page erroneously says "nine").  Six are excellent illustrations by the great H.M. Brock, and 4 are photographs taken by Freeman himself through a microscope of clues to Thorndyke's solutions to the various crimes -- "The Sand from the Murdered Woman's Pillow"and so on.

Doug G