John Thorndyke's Cases: 'I gazed at my friend in blank astonishment''

Dr. Richard Austin Freeman MRCS LSA was born on the 11th April 1862 in Soho, London, the youngest of five children.

At 18 he entered, and later qualified from, the Middlesex Hospital with the honours MRCS and LSA. He was now 24 and spent a further year as a house physician at the hospital before marrying his childhood sweetheart the following year.

He joined the Colonial Service is 1897 and took part in a failed expedition in Ghana, ending up with black water fever and other health issues and being invalided home with no pension.

He now began writing as a career. His first stories were co-written and serialised in 1902-3 in Cassells, one of the premier periodicals of the day. Five years later came his revolutionary contribution to literary structure; the inverted detective story. Its invention was to put the identity of the criminal first and unveil the story from there. His most famous creation to use this new formula was the forensic detective Dr John Thorndyke.

After volunteering for the war as an induction physician and captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps he then added almost a novel a year to his literary canon for the rest of his life.

R Austin Freeman died at his home in Gravesend Kent of the 28th September 1943. He was 81.

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