John Thorndyke's Cases related by Christopher Jervis and edited by R. Austin Freeman by R. Austin FreemanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
At the end of the first book, Jervis, the narrator, changes his situation in a way that would be a spoiler for that book, so here come the spoiler tags: (view spoiler). This second volume in the series is a collection of short stories, and, presumably not finding that situation interesting anymore, the author gets around it in various ways. The first story is set prior to the first book (thus contradicting that book when it shows us that Jervis didn't know what Thorndyke was doing these days, hadn't been in touch with him for some time, and hadn't met his lab assistant); another story has Jervis go back to his previous job as a locum in order to put him in the midst of a mystery; most of them just ignore the situation entirely. Also largely ignored is Thorndyke's other job, as a lecturer; it doesn't ever seem to prevent him from going off to investigate something, and indeed seldom gets mentioned. It's therefore what I term a "superhero job".
The mysteries are not necessarily as colourful as the Holmes cases, but they are varied and clever and thoroughly researched, including actual scientific microphotographs of things like hair and seafloor sand. They're at the beginning of the forensic detective genre, and indeed of forensic science being a thing (Thorndyke is called a "medico-legal expert," but he's what we'd call a forensic scientist; he consults, rather than being part of the police force), and the emphasis is definitely on the clever unwinding of the case. Because Thorndyke always plays his cards close to his chest, and because his Watson, Jervis, is a bit obtuse (often missing things that were obvious to me), we don't get to see the great detective's chain of reasoning until he reveals it at the end of the story.
In contrast to the author's contemporary and partial namesake, Freeman Wills Crofts, the intelligence is mostly on the part of the detective, rather than the criminals; the crimes are often quite mundane once unwound, but the point is that they would have been misinterpreted if Thorndyke hadn't got involved. His specialty is rescuing suspects from wrongful conviction, some of them having been framed by the actual criminal, while others just happen to be in the vicinity of the crime (or, in one case, accident, as it turns out) with an apparent motive. Justice is done, not by the conviction of the guilty (at least not onscreen), but by the exoneration of the innocent.
Though I could wish for a slightly higher proportion of character development to cleverness sometimes, these are enjoyable, and I will keep reading the series.
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