Book Description

These are two short stories from the collection THE GREAT PORTRAIT MYSTERY: "PERCIVAL BLAND'S PROXY" and "THE MISSING MORTGAGEE," wherein the brilliant medical investigator, Dr. Thorndyke, solves murderous crimes. Percival Bland was an uncommon criminal. He knew that his continual passing of counterfeit banknotes would eventually catch up with him, so he had a plan--precautions against the inevitable catastrophe. We can understand why he has created an alternate persona, Robert Lindsay, using disguises and renting two places of residence. No one seems to notice that he and his "cousin" Robert never are at their respective homes simultaneously, nor are they at home when the other visits, nor does anyone see the resemblance of their facial appearance under the makeup. But why does he buy human bones at auction? The lot was described in the catalog as "a complete set of human osteology" but they were not an ordinary "student's set," for the bones of the hands and feet, instead of being strung together on cat-gut, were united by their original ligaments and were "of an unsavoury brown colour." What does he want with those moldy bones? He has a nefarious plan, but it does not fool Dr. Thorndyke. After Dr. Thorndyke solved the case of Percival Bland, the doctor was called in by a life insurance company to investigate another case. There was apparently no doubt that Thomas Elton, a friendless, poverty-stricken artist, had fallen from the top of the overhanging cliff onto the beach. Now, one would suppose with the evidence of this fall of about a hundred and fifty feet, the smashed face and broken neck, there was not much room for doubt as to the cause of death. But Thorndyke indeed has his doubts. R(ichard) Austin Freeman (April 11, 1862 London - September 28, 1943 Gravesend) was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr Thorndyke. He invented the inverted detective story and used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in his novels. A large proportion of the Dr Thorndyke stories involve genuine, but often quite arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from areas such as tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology. Austin Freeman was the youngest of the five children of tailor Richard Freeman and Ann Maria Dunn. He first trained as an apothecary and then studied medicine at Middlesex Hospital, qualifying in 1887. The same year he married Annie Elizabeth with whom he had two sons. He entered the Colonial Service and was sent to Accra on the Gold Coast. In 1891 he returned to London after suffering from blackwater fever but was unable to find a permanent medical position, and so decided to settle down in Gravesend and earn money from writing fiction, while continuing to practice medicine. His first stories were written in collaboration with Dr John James Pitcairn (1860-1936), medical officer at Holloway Prison and published under the nom de plume "Clifford Ashdown." His first Thorndyke story, The Red Thumb Mark, was published in 1907 and shortly afterwards he pioneered the inverted detective story, in which the identity of the criminal is shown from the beginning: some short stories with this feature were collected in The Singing Bone in 1912. During the First World War he served as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and afterwards produced a Thorndyke novel almost every year until his death in 1943.