R. Austin Freeman

A buckling of the geological strata at the Detectives Beyond Borders Archives has brought a book of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke stories to the surface.

Freeman (1862-1943) was the first master of the scientific detective story, and he is said to have tested in his laboratory the science he used in his fiction. He is the reputed inventor of the inverted detective story, in which the reader seen the crime, and the action lies in seeing the investigator figure it out.

The Wikipedia article on Freeman also offers this:

"Raymond Chandler had this to say in a letter to Hamish Hamilton, the British publisher: 'This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre, and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing, he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected ... There is
even a gaslight charm about his Victorian love affairs, and those wonderful walks across London ...'."

But back t0 the inverted detective story or, as we might feel more comfortable calling it, the Columbo story. Who else wrote stories of this type?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010