Dr. Thorndyke. The Mystery of 31 New Inn

Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943) — an English writer renowned for his detective novels featuring the forensic expert Dr. Thorndike: the cycle includes 22 novels and 40 short stories. Freeman considered himself the creator of the “inverted detective” — a type of genre in which the identity of the criminal is known to the reader from the very first pages, while the intrigue is built around how the crime will be uncovered. Since 1930, from the time of its founding, he had been a member of the Detective Club.

Dr. John Evelyn Thorndike is a fictional detective and a practicing physician who chose forensic medicine and became one of the early representatives of scientific criminology. Investigating murders, he often works together with his colleague Christopher Jervis (usually it is he who narrates) and with the shrewd laboratory assistant Nathaniel Poulton. Unlike many private detectives, Thorndike maintains a business relationship with the police, though he has more than once proven the official investigation’s conclusions to be wrong. He is tall, athletically built, attractive, and extremely observant; he is unmarried and has no children.

CONTAINS SMOKING SCENES. SMOKING KILLS.