Initially something of a dull fish (“ll women-kind are more or less prone to hysteria but whereas the normal woman tends to laugh and cry, the weaker vessels develop inexplicable diseases, with a tendency to social reform and emancipation.”) there is at least the occasional air of realisation about him:Ī young and newly-qualified doctor, emerging for the first time into private practice, is apt to be somewhat surprised and disconcerted by the new conditions. In true era-appropriate style, Jardine is something of an idiot: it takes three clear attempts on his life, enough to terrify most normal people into hiding forever, before he begins to perceive the threat against himself, and even then he decides to ignore Thorndyke’s stern advice and go for tea with Miss Vyne, the Lovely Young Thing brought into his orbit by his adventures. In that regard I consider myself fortunate, and grateful to Nick Fuller, for having been directed to some of Freeman’s later, more sophisticated puzzles already, since the prospect of reading thirty more of these would not prove as invigorating as I know Freeman to have become shortly hereafter. You’ll spot the guilty party at forty paces, the nascent genre having yet to adopt the democratisation of suspicion that marked out the sea change of the Golden Age, but when you consider the gap this is bridging, between late Victorian suspense literature and genuine detection fast approaching, that’s hardly a surprise. Much as with Thorndyke’s debut, the question can be answered simply by reading the final chapter, as a fair amount of what precedes Thorndyke’s typically exhaustive elucidation - “ will never tell you anything until he can tell you everything” is a lovely distillation of the Great Detective’s habit of keeping his cards well within the bounds of his chest - is mere adventuring and scrapes to provide a bit of intrigue. Cremation seems a foolproof way to disguise murder, if a suitably slapdash doctor was convinced to sign a certificate allowing it, since surely nothing can be gleaned from a pile of ashes and a few remaining bone fragments. Here, he is concerned with the growing fad of cremation after death: “The grave gives up its secrets now and again, but the crematorium furnace never” is the aphorism offered up early on, and - as did the infallibility of fingerprints in The Red Thumb Mark (1907) - this comes under the scrutiny of Freeman’s wonderful creation Dr. Having established his writing career before the dawn of the Golden Age of detective fiction, it seems to me that Richard Austin Freeman’s early works are to be read less as puzzles and more as John Rhode-ian experiments in examining what is admissible under the science of the time. Before long, a discovery at the scene of this vanishing, a chance encounter with the comely Miss Sylvia Vyne, a suspicious clergyman, and the death of an elderly patient just as Jardine is about to act as locum tenens for another doctor’s practice will combine with this mobile corpse to make quite the most “astounding sequence” in young Jardine’s life, changing it forever. Sheltering from the rain while out for a walk in north London one September evening, trainee doctor Humphrey Jardine happens upon the body of a dead man, only for the corpse to have vanished by the time he is able to bring the police to the location.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |