First Published: 1907
Pages: 199
Ebook Publisher: Various
Ebook Date: Various
When it comes to forensic investigation there is one literary character that stands head and shoulders above all others. The undisputed original template for television shows such as Bones, Waking the Dead and Crime Scene Investigation, with all of its spin-offs, CSI: Miami/Vegas/etc.
The character is Dr. John Thorndyke, created by English writer Richard Austin Freeman in the early years of the twentieth century.
Thorndyke made his debut in the 1907 story The Red Thumb Mark. In it, he is ably assisted by his university friend Dr. Christopher Jervis, and his 'man' - the highly talented laboratory assistant Polton. The medico-legal expert resides at 5A King's Bench Walk located in the Inner Temple, one of the four Inns of Court in the City of London, England. The area has been well-known for many years as the center of London legal offices.
Freeman was open about Thorndyke being influenced by Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character - but added that he wanted to infuse him with his own medical and legal experiences to embellish his consulting detective with an air of the (then) modern forensic methods, in order to separate him from the crowd.
In his own words from later introductions of his collected stories, Freeman says,
...I asked myself whether it might not be possible to devise a detective story of a slightly different kind - one based on the science of Medical Jurisprudence, in which, by the sacrifice of a certain amount of dramatic effect, one could keep entirely within the facts of real life, with nothing fictitious excepting the persons and the events.
Richard Austin Freeman lived between 1862 and 1943. Born in Britain, he went to medical school at the Middlesex Hospital where he qualified at the age of 24. After marriage, he and his family moved to Ghana, where he was a surgeon for the Colonial Services. Following many travels around the African continent he became ill and was sent home in 1891.