Review: The Red Thumb Mark

The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first of a series featuring a scientific detective, John Thorndyke, whose science and reasoning were, honestly, better than Sherlock Holmes, on whom he is clearly based. He's a medico-legal expert, and the books are written as if they're told by his Watson equivalent - also a doctor, brighter than Holmes's Watson, though nothing compared with Thorndyke.

It's an interesting premise: Diamonds have gone missing from a safe, and there's a big honking clue in the form of a fingerprint in blood that matches the safe owner's nephew. Problem is, nobody who knows the nephew believes for a second that he would do such a thing, but fingerprint evidence is generally taken as utterly compelling and incontrovertible. Enter Thorndyke, who looks beneath the surface and discovers, and eventually demonstrates brilliantly in court, that this isn't always the case.

Thorndyke keeps his plans and insights under wraps even from his assistants, so we keep reading in order to find out what they are. I did guess the culprit very early on, and even had a good idea how it might have been done (though not in the detail Thorndyke presents), but I had the motive wrong. My suspicions got stronger as the villain attacked Thorndyke with the intention of killing him and removing his contribution to the case (since only he knew what he was working on); this gave some action to the story. There was also a romance subplot, stronger and more developed than in a lot of books of the period, and because I liked both the course and resolution of it, that compensated somewhat for the fact that I'd guessed the culprit and their method.

Overall, the character work is better than average for the time, and the mystery is enjoyable and unusual, and I'll be reading more in this series. Some modern readers may find the highly-educated prose, with occasional Latin tags and quotations from English literature, offputting; it's the kind of thing Wodehouse parodied in Jeeves and Wooster, where Bertie always gets it wrong. But it's just the way that educated men of the era talked among themselves, and personally, I didn't mind it; it didn't reach the level of seeming pretentious.

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