Review: The Mystery of 31 New Inn

The Mystery of 31 New Inn by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Christopher Jervis, the narrator of this book, is very much Watson to the forensic scientist Thorndyke's Sherlock Holmes, and that includes being thick as a plank. Watson did sometimes come up with theories, though they were always wrong; Jervis can't even do that. It's clear that the benefits of the partnership flow mostly in Jervis's direction.

There are three reasons I can think of for having a character like this. One is as the "foil"; because Jervis and Watson are so much less intelligent than their highly intelligent principals, those principals look even more brilliant by contrast. Another is so that readers who can't figure out the clues feel that at least they're not alone, and a third is so that readers who can figure out the clues can feel superior to him, which I have to admit I did. Of course, I didn't work out the whole thing in the detail that Thorndyke did, but by a third of the way through I'd tumbled to one of the key points, at least, which was the one that (by coincidence) Jervis was directly involved with, and figured out the motive and at least part of the method.

Still, watching the case be solved has its own entertainment value, which is why I keep reading these. It's also interesting to read something set at the very beginning of the 20th century, at the point of transition from Victorian to Edwardian, when practically all vehicles were still drawn by horses, electricity and telephones were both new and not widely installed, and forensic science was in its infancy (and still influenced by scientific theories which have since been discarded or improved upon).

I did notice that the author was careful to provide a reason why Jervis's fiancée, acquired in the first book, could not appear onstage; apparently, with the romance subplot of that book resolved, her utility was at an end, and she would only have cluttered up the plot of this one with irrelevant distractions. There's only one woman in the whole book, and she is seldom seen clearly and, even when present, is mostly peripheral.

The author is a huge snob, which doesn't come out particularly strongly in this book, but does in some of the others; he has no time at all for the lower classes, and in fact wrote a book about how some of them shouldn't be allowed to breed. Yes, he was a eugenicist, and a bit of an anti-Semite, like a lot of conservatives of his generation - at least until Nazi Germany demonstrated where that naturally led, at which point he and most of his fellows turned away from those ideas, to give them slight credit. But mostly that doesn't obtrude too clearly, and honestly almost any book from the time will have issues like this. Although this isn't one of the best Thorndykes, in my opinion, it's still enjoyable as a period mystery, and it makes it into the lowest tier of my recommendation list for the year.

View all my reviews