Review: As A Thief In The Night

As A Thief In The Night by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite being a relatively late entry in the Dr Thorndyke series, this is one of the half-dozen or so available on Project Gutenberg (at time of review), which is where I picked it up. There isn't a lot of inter-book continuity to worry about with this series, so skipping over a few isn't a problem.

Compared to the earlier books, this is a more human and humane story, where we feel the emotional impact of the murders more than the cleverness of the intellectual problem. As often with Freeman's books, I did figure out the method of the murder early on, because the author kept dropping big hints about it, though it took me a lot longer to work out the murderer - partly because the detective, Thorndyke, has access to facts not made available to the reader until he explains them at the end. Not everything is fully covered in his explanation; we get the means and the motive, but there are some minor details left unexplained. (view spoiler)[Where did the murderer obtain the poison? Where did they hide the candle-mould when the police were searching? (hide spoiler)]

It's told from the point of view of a new character, a lawyer who knows Thorndyke and asks him to investigate the death by poisoning of the husband of his old friend and almost-sister, in order to lift the cloud of suspicion hanging over not only his friend but the whole household. He has a clear conflict of interest, and several times deliberately withholds information from Thorndyke because it points to one or another of his friends, but Thorndyke, with his typical approach of not telling anyone anything while he investigates and seeing through obfuscation, figures it out anyway.

Thorndyke shows genuine sympathy and consideration for his friend throughout, which is much more appealing to me than his chaffing, snobbish persona in the early books. The book came out in 1928, more than 20 years after the first book, so it's good to see that the author was growing in range and not just sticking with a successful formula. By that time, Dorothy L. Sayers had published several of her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and I like to think that Freeman was influenced by that sympathetic and considerate detective; I know she read his books (Lord Peter mentions them at one point), and it's likely he read hers too.

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