DR. THORNDYKE'S
CASEBOOK:
The Detective
Fiction of R. Austin Freeman
“All
the Austin Freeman qualities are present – vast mechanical and medical
ingenuity, clear, delightfully pompous style conveying gas-lit
nineteenth
century atmosphere.”
– Maurice Richardson, Observer,
31st
March 1940
<>
“Mr. Freeman is a past-master of the
gradual, cumulative art of mystifying.
The facts he keeps casually mentioning become a maze of criminal
cunning. At the moment of his own
choosing he discloses a plan of admirable symmetry.”
– Times Literary Supplement, 30th May
1942
<>
Like Anthony Berkeley, R. Austin Freeman has
recently undergone a renaissance. His
books
have always been recognised as classics of the genre – but so few of
them have
been in print since his death. The recent
republication of his works by the House of Stratus means that the
modern reader
can rediscover all his virtues: the scientific interest of his plots,
with murderers
poisoning their victims with arsine and thieves discovered on the
strength of a
few grains of dust; his portrayal of an Edwardian London which Dickens,
writing
fifty years before, would have recognised; his ability to evoke
sympathy for
both the hunter and the hunted, often telling the story from the
perspective of
the criminal (the stories collected in The
Singing Bone or the novel Mr. Pottermack’s
Oversight); and his eye for character, notably in As a
Thief in the Night. Despite
Julian Symons’s claim that reading Freeman was “like chewing on dry
straw”,
there is a quiet charm to Freeman’s novels which, especially in these
hectic
days, makes them infinitely rewarding.
What's New:
These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller,
2000--2010. Created 5th December 2004.
