Orwell and the Detectives: I

Introduction. George Orwell’s completed his article ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ on 28 August 1944, having thought of it as The Ethics of the Detective Story. It was published in the October 1944 issue of the British journal Horizon; and the November 1944 issue of the American journal Politics. He wrote that:

It seems to be the case that the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels, has greatly increased in blood-thirstiness during the past twenty years. Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance, are not all murders, and some of them do not even deal with an indictable crime. So also with the John Thorndyke stories, while of the Max Carrados stories, only a minority are murders.

Most people know that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories. John Thorndyke and Max Carrados are different. Here I look at Richard Austin Freeman who wrote the Dr John Thorndyke stories; and, in Part Two, Ernest Brammah Smith who wrote the Max Carrados stories.

Part One. Richard Austin Freeman was born on 11 April 1862 at Marylebone in London, the youngest of the five children of Richard Freeman a tailor, who had risen to manage a bespoke tailoring business; and Ann Maria Freeman née Dunn. Richard Freeman senior died in London in 1890 aged sixty seven leaving £1,496, 5s 2d.

Freeman studied at a North London boarding school and then worked in a chemist’s shop. In 1880, aged eighteen, he started training at Middlesex Hospital, qualifying as a surgeon and apothecary in 1886. On 15 April 1887 he married his childhood sweetheart Annie Elizabeth Edwards, aged twenty five, in London. Her father Thomas Edwards was a master plumber.

Dr Freeman then joined the Colonial Medical Service, and was for eighteen months as Assistant Surgeon at Accra in the Gold Coast (Ghana), a British West African colony. He then served in an expedition to Ashanti-land in Northern Ghana, and Bondoukou in the Ivory Coast, as a medical officer, naturalist and surveyor. He reported on the products, animals and plants he had seen.

Freeman then returned to Accra, and was a member of the Anglo-German Boundary Commission which determined the border between the Gold Coast and Togoland a German colony. In 1891 he developed black-water fever i.e. severe malaria. He was invalided home and discharged from the Colonial Medical Service two months before he was eligible for a pension.

Freeman briefly worked at Middlesex Hospital, in the Ear, Nose, and Throat Department, and was then a London GP. He moved to Broadstairs in Kent in 1894; and Gravesend in Kent but nearer London, in 1897. He practised medicine and wrote. In 1901 he was appointed Holloway Prison Acting Deputy Medical Officer, and in 1904 a Port of London Acting Assistant Medical Officer. In 1905 he had a breakdown and retired from medicine to live by writing.

The Freemans had two sons. Clifford John Austin Freeman was born in 1894 and died in 1971 aged seventy six. Lawrence Austin Freeman was born in 1897 and died in 1946 aged forty nine.

Dr Freeman’s first two books were non-fiction about West Africa. They appeared in 1893 and 1898. His first fictional works were The Adventures of Romney Pringle, written jointly with John James Pitcairn the Holloway Medical Officer. Some were first published in Australia under the joint pseudonym Ralph J. Jay. All were serialised under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown in Cassell’s Magazine in 1902-1903.

In 1905 Cassell published Freeman’s first solo novel The Golden Pool: set in West Africa. In it a young Englishman steals an African fetish with dire consequences. For many years it was required reading for British officials in West Africa.

Dr John Thorndyke. Collingwood, of London, published Dr Freeman’s first Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke novel, The Red Thumb Mark, in 1907. Newton of New York published an American edition in 1911. Twenty nine more Dr Thorndyke novels and short story collections were published. The last The Jacob Street mystery appeared in 1942 when Freeman was eighty.

Dr Thorndyke was assisted in the novels by his friend and foil Christopher Jervis who is usually the ostensible narrator, and Nathaniel Polton a lab technician who Thorndyke has rescued from poverty. Dr Thorndyke has better relations with the police than Sherlock Holmes did; but often proves them wrong.

Dr Freeman also wrote novels and short stories independent of the Thorndyke series, notably The Uttermost Farthing: A Savant’s Vendetta (1914). In it a burglar kills the hero’s wife. The hero tracks down and kills twenty four criminals before killing the actual killer. Dr Freeman pioneered the inverted detective story in which the reader is first told who the killer is, and then watches the detective hunt down the killer.

Dr Freeman was a Conservative and a eugenicist. He disliked the very poor and Jews and some of his writings reflect this, though after Hitler came to power Freeman switched to portraying good Jewish characters. As Freeman used his own medical knowledge, did careful research and visited the alleged scenes of his novels Dr Thorndyke was far more plausible a character than Sherlock Holmes.

George Orwell recommended Freeman’s The Eye of Osiris (1911) in a book list he sent to Brenda Salkeld; in the 23 July 1936 New English Review wrote that Freeman was one of three detective story writers worth reading, the others being Conan Doyle and Ernest Bramah; and praised Freeman in an article about Charles Reade in the 17 August 1940 New Statesman.

Later Orwell praised Freeman in an article in French, ‘Grandeur et Decadence du roman policier Anglais’ (1944) (see Part II); and praised The Eye of Osiris and The Singing Bone (1912) in a 2 November 1945 Tribune article ‘Good Bad Books’. He finally mentions Freeman, writing in a 14 February 1949 letter to Jacintha Buddicom:

Do you remember our passion for R. Austin Freeman? I have never really lost it and I think I must have read his entire works except some of the very last ones. I think he only died quite recently, at a great age.

Richard Austin Freeman had died at his Gravesend home on Tuesday 28 September 1943 aged eighty one. He left £6,471 5s 11d. Some of his books have been reprinted; some were televised by the BBC in 1964 and Thames TV in 1971-1973; and in 2011-2013 BBC Radio broadcast some adaptations.