The R Austin Freeman Omnibus Edition Author:R. Austin Freeman This is volume 1 of an eleven-volume edition of the entire writings of the creator of the immortal Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, the medico-legal investigator of 5a King's Bench Walk, including pieces not previously collected. This material is supplemented by a new revised and enlarged edition of Norman Donaldson's fine biography of Freeman and Tho... more »rndyke and also by scholarly essays about the great man, drawn from The Thorndyke File and elsewhere. Donaldson has also prepared for each Thorndyke novel (and for the collection of short stories) an introduction and "afterword" that put into perspective each member of the series as Freeman wrote them (for the stories are presented here in chronological order of publication), assess its strengths and weaknesses and examine the ways the author was progressively learning to master his unusual material to best effect, the aim being to make the reading ? or rereading ? of the entire Thorndyke canon a particularly rewarding experience.
Volume I: Here are the first Thorndyke novels, those offered to the world from 1907 to 1913, beginning with The Red Thumb Mark, a monument of the genre, in which the medicolegal investigator makes his entrance. Freeman conceived him many years earlier, and by the beginning of the century had drafted an embryonic story around him that was delayed in publication for several years. It first appeared as a long short story in an American magazine in 1911 as "31, New Inn," before its publication as a completely rewritten full-length novel, The Mystery of 31 New Inn. Both versions are included here, and readers, with the aid of Donaldson's commentaries, can gain insight into Freeman's methods of developing and deepening his approach. The Eye of Osiris combines the detective investigation with a love story set amid the mummy cases in the British Museum's Egyptology department. The first volume concludes with A Silent Witness; considered by many the finest of the Thorndyke novels, it incorporates a scene around a furnace, upstairs at No. 5a, in which the cause of death of a murder victim is successfully established by examination of crematory remains. The year after this novel's appearance, our author ? and, incidentally, his two sons -- were called away to war, and Thorndyke went into retirement for almost a decade.« less