R. Austin Freeman (Richard Austin Freeman) Biography

British detectivestory writer. The son of a Soho tailor, he studied medicine, entered the Colonial Service, and in 1887 was posted to the Gold Coast. Invalided home with blackwater fever in 1891, he turned to writing, producing Travels and Life in Ashanti and Jaman (1898), a classic in the travel genre. His first detective stories, The Adventures of Romney Pringle, written in conjunction with a friend, Dr J. J. Pitcairn, appeared under the pseudonym of Clifford Ashdown in 1902. These were followed by The Red Thumb Mark (1907), written under his own name, and in which his detective, Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke, first appears. Thorndyke, who is the central figure in twenty other novels—the last is The Jacob Street Mystery (1942)—and many short stories, probably commands more serious intellectual respect than any other fictional detective: his presence is imposing, his knowledge encyclopaedic, and his deductions have a logical rigour which is absent from those of his contemporary Sherlock Holmes. Freeman's first works passed unnoticed; he first made his name with the collection of short stories The Singing Bone (1912), in which he introduced the concept of the ‘inverted tale’, later much imitated. In the first half of these stories the reader is shown a crime being committed; in the second, how the detective arrives at its solution.