The Uttermost Farthing: a Free Book review

The Uttermost Farthing (free audiobook here) by R. Austin Freeman is not a Dr. Thorndyke novel; quite the opposite. It's more nearly what you might get if Thorndyke turned vigilante.

A word of warning: this story is somewhat ghoulish. It isn't particularly graphic, but the concept is rather gross. I won't explain it: just read the first chapter, and you'll know basically what's going on. If it grosses you out, drop the whole idea.

You may ask why I stuck it out. Well, there is a certain grim fascination to the idea, in part because Humphrey Challoner is so different from Thorndyke in some ways.

In any case, this is the setup:

Years before the story opens, Challoner is a happily married man. He's also an anatomist with a small private museum specializing in skeletal remains, especially of animals with deformities. His hobby turns out to have more staying power than his marriage, however, when a burglar decides to arrest Mrs. Challoner's vital functions with a bullet.

As they say in the action-hero genre, Big Mistake.

Even stunned by his sudden change of marital status, Challoner is a lot smarter than the cops. He notices that the murderer left behind finger prints (this was the late 1800s, before the cops were as fixated with latent prints as they were in The Red Thumb Mark). There's also a bit of hair--and not ordinary hair; it's ringed hair, unusual enough to help identify the culprit even without the finger prints. Armed with this evidence, the best physique and training money can buy, and a heapin' helpin' of vigilante spirit, Challoner's going to remove some bad guys from the gene pool.

Did I mention that this is before the story opens? Well, let's open the story, already.

As the story begins, Humphrey Challoner is an old man on the way out. He likes his doctor, a guy named Wharton, who is more like Jervis than Thorndyke. Challoner has shown Dr. Wharton around the private museum at times. He tells the doctor about his personal tragedy and bequeaths the place--especially the museum--to the doctor, including a unique collection no one else even knows exists. Dr. Wharton also gets a secret stash of notes detailing the provenance of all the more interesting specimens. The bulk of the story is Wharton's edited version of those notes.

It should be clear that Challoner's new hobby doesn't bear imitating, though he does set things up (generally) so that he's acting in self defense. Still, the story has points of interest as Dr. Wharton mulls over the moral and philosophical issues. The main mystery here, however, is why no one has made a major movie out of this so far.

The Eye of Osiris: a Free Book review

The Eye of Osiris (free audiobook here) by R. Austin Freeman is the second Dr. Thorndyke novel. In some respects, it's the better story--it's certainly the better mystery, because the solution won't be as obvious to a modern reader. However, it's also more ideologically motivated than The Red Thumb Mark: Freeman was not a Christian--he considered Christianity an outmoded relic--and there's a strong element of paganism in this story that wasn't nearly as noticeable in the first one.

Anyway--as the story opens, Dr. John Thorndyke is lecturing on the legal and medical problems of determining when (or if) someone has died. (This can affect inheritance if the order of two deaths is unknown.) He mentions a recent incident in which a man, John Bellingham, disappeared mysteriously, noting that it's likely to become a legal muddle. Then we flash forward a few years, and he was right.

One of the medical students at the lecture was Paul Berkeley, our narrator. He's substituting for another doctor when he encounters John Bellingham's brother, Godfrey, and niece, Ruth, both reduced to penury, which didn't pay well back then. And it's all because of perhaps the stupidest will in history.

Why stupid? The man who disappeared bequeathed £5,000 to his cousin and the rest of the estate to his brother. However, he stipulated that his remains be deposited in a proper spot in one of a few specific parishes. Since he has disappeared, it could be difficult to carry this out: they neither know where his body is nor whether he's done using it. But if the body is not so disposed of, the cousin gets the whole estate.

The cousin is trying to have the idiot testator declared dead, which would pretty much give him the estate. And suddenly bits of skeleton start showing up in places on or near the missing man's property...

The story is also rather droll in places. For example, at the hearing to determine whether to declare the missing man dead, a lawyer mentions the disappearance, "the most remarkable feature of that disappearance being, perhaps, its suddenness and completeness." The judge retorts, "It would, perhaps, have been even more remarkable if the testator had disappeared gradually and incompletely."

To conclude: the theological aspects are annoying, but otherwise this is a very entertaining and (dare I say it?) educational mystery. Recommended with some reservations.

The Red Thumb Mark: a Free Book review

The Red Thumb Mark (free audiobook here) by R. Austin Freeman is the first Dr. Thorndyke novel. Dr. Thorndyke was a medical doctor turned lawyer, and effectively a pioneer in forensic science: he usually played the part of an expert witness, leaving the regular lawyering to an associate.

The Red Thumb Mark is interesting enough, despite the fact that a modern reader will not only know the culprit's identity almost immediately but also (generally) how it was done. In fact, at various points, something that would have been practically unimaginable to the readers of 1907 will be obvious to us, which shows how fleeting high-tech gimmickry is. You're more likely to be mystified at some of the antiquated features, such as the way the typewriters worked more than a century ago.

Anyway--a small fortune in diamonds has been taken from a safe, which was clearly unlocked rather than burgled, and an obliging clue left in the safe seems to resolve the mystery immediately: a thumbprint in blood that conveniently points to an otherwise virtuous man. From the standpoint of detection, the main item of interest is how Thorndyke will thwart the evil plot.

There's also the small matter of several attempts on Thorndyke's life, some rather ingenious, especially for the time. And the way visits with prisoners were conducted. Thorndyke gives a strong indictment of the criminal justice system of the time, and not all the problems have been addressed even yet.

This also marks the debut of Dr. Christopher Jervis, Thorndyke's Watson who chronicles many of his adventures. Like Watson, Jervis is the second banana who acts as the romantic lead; like Holmes, Thorndyke is evidently above such things. So there is a love story here as well, and a fairly good one at that.

In sum, it's an engaging read that can teach you a lot about the period--and perhaps a bit about forensic science as well.