Forgotten Book - Mr Pottermack's Oversight

I started reading Richard Austin Freeman's stories about Dr Thorndyke when I was about twelve or thirteen. A schoolfriend lent me an omnibus of the short stories and I devoured them enthusiastically. But after reading one or two of the novels, my tastes changed and I found myself less attracted to scientific detection and more interested in other types of crime writing. When I came back to Freeman, however, many years later, I found that his merits endure. His writing style is formal and was old-fashioned even towards the end of his own lifetime, but there's something about his best work that is quite compelling. Even Raymond Chandler appreciated that.

For some reason, I've never got round to reading one of his most famous novels until now. This is Mr Pottermack's Oversight and it's an inverted mystery of the type that Austin Freeman first popularised with the stories collected in The Singing Bone just before the First World War. Dorothy L. Sayers was among his most fervent admirers and perhaps this was a factor that encouraged him to adapt his approach to the inverted story and write a novel.

And the first thing I'd like to say is that, rather more than ninety years on, it stands up to scrutiny. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the protagonist, Marcus Pottermack, is essentially a decent man, even though he is naive and ultimately driven to commit murder. His victim, a blackmailer, is devoid of redeeming features other than superficial charm and it's almost impossible not to root for him.

Second, the scientific element of the detective work undertaken by Thorndyke is interesting and clearly explained. Pottermack's methods seem ingenious, but they aren't quite craft enough to outwit the great man. Third, the situation resolves itself in a way that I find appealing. This isn't a conventional detective story, and it isn't even conventional by the standards of Golden Age inverted mysteries (I don't think Freeman Wills Crofts would have had the stomach to end the story in the way that Austin Freeman does, but then, the two Freemans were very different personalities). I really enjoyed this story and, although as I say I'm an Austin Freeman fan of long-standing, it appealed to me even more than I anticipated. Recommended. 

Forgotten Book - Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke

When I was about thirteen or so, a friend of mine, knowing of my interest in detective stories, lent me a copy of a novel by R.Austin Freeman that belonged to his family. I took a look at the first page, but found the style off-putting. I never got any further and in the end I gave the book back. But a little while later, another schoolfriend lent me an omnibus volume of Freeman's short stories about Dr Thorndyke, and I found that much more to my taste. (Yes, I was lucky in my schoolfriends, wasn't I?) Ever since then, I've had a soft spot for Austin Freeman.

The novel that I failed to persevere with was Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke, and I've finally got round to reading it. And guess what? This time, I rather enjoyed it. It's one of those books with two distinct plot strands which eventually come together. The early pages are narrated by a likeable young fellow called Jasper Grey who gets involved in some mysterious goings-on, while the puzzle put before Dr Thorndyke concerns the inexplicable disappearance of Sir Edward Hardcastle.

Austin Freeman is often described, and fairly, as a major figure of the Golden Age, but several factors differentiate his work from that of, say, Dorothy L. Sayers (who greatly admired him) and Agatha Christie. He was an older person who came to prominence as a writer in the Edwardian era, and there is an old-fashioned feel about his prose and dialogue. This is partly why I was deterred from reading this book originally, and helps to explain why Julian Symons famously (if too harshly) compared reading Freeman to "chewing dry straw". There's also a whiff of antisemitism about some of the language used; whether that reflects Freeman's thinking or simply the attitudes of his characters, I'm not sure, but I suspect the former. Another issue is that Freeman's great interest lay in the meticulous scientific and technical accuracy of his criminal and investigative schemes. So if you're looking for "least likely person" whodunits, you won't get much joy from a book like this. His ingenuity was of a very different sort to Christie's.

Yet despite these reservations, I found myself being more entertained by this book than I'd expected. It's not a masterpiece, and I don't even suggest that it's one of Freeman's best books. But it's a bit out of the ordinary and that's no bad thing. I'm glad that, after so many years, I finally got to the end of it.

Forgotten Book - Dr Thorndyke Intervenes

A couple of years ago, I was fortunate enough to acquire a copy of Dr Thorndyke Intervenes that was inscribed by the author, R. Austin Freeman. The inscription appealed to me because it is one of those relatively uncommon ones that casts some light on the author's construction of the story. He gave the book to his friend R.F. Jessup and explained that "the notorious Druce case furnished the suggestion" for the main plot strand, adding that another element of the plot derived from "my experiences with a pair of platinum-nosed forceps".

The novel was published in 1933 and is written in Freeman's characteristic leisurely, rather prolix style. But it begins with a vivid and memorable opening scene at Fenchurch Street Station when a man comes to reclaim some left luggage. What is found, however, is a trunk that contains a human head. The man immediately flees the scene, leaving bystanders with an inexplicable conundrum.

In typical Freeman style, the focus soon shifts to another plot strand. A likeable American called Pippet has come to England to pursue an unlikely-seeming claim to an inheritance. He has the misfortune to encounter a wily chap with an even wilier solicitor friend, and is naive enough to be induced to hire the lawyer to progress the claim. But they soon come up against Dr Thorndyke, who has been instructed by a rival claimant.

The plot thickens from there. The interest lies not so much in the machinations which resulted in the discovery of the human head (which involve a bunch of not very interesting villains) as in the neat way in which Freeman dovetails the various plot strands. It's quite a clever story, even if the behaviour of one or two of the characters does test one's suspension of disbelief. And, as is so often the case with Freeman, it has a rather unconventional structure and flavour which compensate for the sometimes portentous prose.

The Measure of Malice

Life is pretty hectic at the moment, and as a result I've been rather tardy in talking about my latest UK publication! This is another anthology in the British Library Crime Classics series, The Measure of Malice. The theme here is scientific detection. I've been keen with the story collections in this series to ring the changes in terms of theme, as well as trying to ensure diversity of content.

An anthology of short stories needs to have a distinctive personality, I think. On the whole, readers tend not to be tempted by random assortments of stories in a book, however good the individual stories. It's a given, in almost all cases, that different readers will respond differently to particular stories in an anthology, and that they won't like each story equally. That doesn't seem to me to be a problem. The real joy of anthology often lies in a discovery of the unexpected. One buys the book because one is tempted by the theme, or by the inclusion of a favourite story or author, and then one stumbles across something unfamiliar that is, perhaps unexpectedly, highly enjoyable. That's what I find as a reader of anthologies; it's what I love about them. And it's what I aim for when editing an anthology myself.

I'm no scientist, as my miserable Grade 5 in Physics O Level attests (and weirdly, I have never had a single chemistry lesson in my life), but science does interest me, and its application in detective work is of course of great importance. The focus of The Measure of Malice is on early examples of scientific detection - no DNA fingerprinting, CCTV surveillance, or mobile phone tracking here! But although some of the technology now seems quaint, it also has a considerable appeal as well as historic significance.

For this book, I've rounded up the usual suspects, such as R. Austin Freeman, creator of Dr Thorndyke, and J.J. Connington, in real life a distinguished professor of chemistry. And there are great names such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers, the latter making a venture into forensic dentistry in a story that I really like. But there are also less familiar names, such as Ernest Dudley, creator of  Dr Morelle, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, and Carl Bechhofer Roberts. Who knows, it may be that some readers tempted by Doyle and Sayers find themselves drawn to Dudley and his lesser known colleagues. I hope so, and I hope that crime fans find plenty to enjoy in this new collection. 

Invisible Ink by Christopher Fowler

I'm very keen on "books about books" and have just finished reading one that is an absolute gem. It's early days, but if I read a more entertaining book about books in the whole of 2013, I'll count myself extremely fortunate. I'm talking about a little volume called Invisible Ink: How 100  Great Authors Disappeared. The publisher - not previously known to me - is Strange Attractor Press, and the author is Christopher Fowler.

Chris Fowler is someone I've only met very briefly in person, though we do share an agent, but I've been delighted to receive a couple of brilliant short stories from him for CWA anthologies, featuring his series characters Bryant and May. His writing is distinguished by a combination of intelligence and wit that is very much to my taste, and these qualities are constantly in evidence throughout this little book.

The title really is self-explanatory. It's based on a long series of articles Chris Fowler wrote for  The Independent, and at times the pieces show their journalistic origins. There are a few errors of fact, of the kind that crop up in all books like this. For instance, Harry Keating did not produce "the definitive biography of Agatha Christie", but rather edited a book of essays about her. It is also a pity that not only does the book lack an index, there isn't even a list of contents. But at least this meant that it was a pleasant surprise to keep reading and find such great choices of author and so many fascinating and unexpected anecdotes.

There are far too many good lines for me to quote them all, but I really loved the description of Ronald Firbank as "a sort of polar opposite to Andy McNab." Quite a lot of interesting crime writers are featured (but is Harry, who died less than two years ago, really forgotten? it's a grim thought), including the likes of Gladys Mitchell, John Dickson Carr and Austin Freeman. However, there are some people I confess I've never even heard of and some of their personal stories were gripping. Fowler's gift is to make you want to read what his chosen hundred (or at least, most of them) have written, even though each of his pieces is short as well as snappy. All I want now is for him to find another hundred equally fascinating authors to tell us about. In the meantime, I am sure many readers of this blog will enjoy this book as much as I did.

A Mystery of the Deep Sea

There is nothing new about the importance of forensic pathology in detective fiction, and I was reminded of this when watching the opening episode of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, a very enjoyable collection on DVD of the first series of this excellent TV show from the 1970s. The mystery in question was ‘A Message from the Deep Sea’, and the author of the original tale on which the episode was based was R. Austin Freeman.

Freeman’s detective was Dr John Thorndyke, and if you haven’t come across him, you have missed a giant of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Thorndyke specialised in what he liked to call ‘medical jurisprudence’, and – often assisted by his friend Jervis, he used his scientific expertise to unravel countless puzzles that defeated the hapless chaps from Scotland Yard and sundry rural forces.

In this episode, Dr Thorndyke was played by John Neville – a handsome actor, whose casting provides a reminder that Thorndyke was supposed to be a handsome man, though the emphasis was always on his detective skills, his personal life never intruding as it would be in the hands of a modern writer. The puzzle involved the throat-cutting of a young woman, and the police suspicion of a classic ‘obvious suspect’. In an inquest scene, Thorndyke establishes that the evidence proves the guilt of another – a chap who foolishly makes a run for it, only to be captured by the burly cops Thorndyke has arranged to be stationed in the makeshift courtroom.

I enjoyed this episode. Neville makes Thorndyke rather more charismatic than I remember him from my teenage years, when I read many of the Freeman short stories, plus several of the novels. Jervis was played by James Cossins, best remembered as a hotel inspector in an episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’, while one of the cops was played by Terence Rigby, better known in the 70s as P.C. Snow in Softly, Softly.