The Bones of the Case
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A charred skeleton, a missing man, and a chain of physical clues no one else can read – Dr Thorndyke brings the exacting eye of the forensic laboratory to a death that baffles the police.
R. Austin Freeman was the great pioneer of the scientific detective story, and his medico-legal investigator John Thorndyke remains one of fiction's most rigorous minds. In The Bones of the Case, first collected in 1918, Thorndyke reconstructs a crime from the smallest of material traces, following the evidence with the patience of a true scientist. Freeman is also credited with inventing the inverted mystery, in which the reader watches the crime before the detection begins.
R. Austin Freeman
R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943) was a British author of detective stories. A pioneer of the inverted detective story, in which the reader knows from the start who committed the crime, Freeman is best known as the creator of the “medical jurispractitioner” Dr. John Thorndyke. First introduced in The Red Thumb Mark (1907), the brilliant forensic investigator went on to star in dozens of novels and short stories over the next decades.
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