Dr. John Thorndyke is a medical jurispractitioner - originally a medical doctor, he turned to the bar and became one of the first, in modern parlance, forensic scientists. His solutions were based on his method of collecting all possible data (including dust and pond weed) and making inferences from them before looking at any of the protagonists and motives in the crimes. (Freeman, it is said, conducted all experiments mentioned in the stories himself.) It is this method which gave rise to one of Freeman's most ingenious inventions, the inverted detective story, where the criminal act is described first and the interest lies in Thorndyke's subsequent unraveling of it. Table of Contents: Introduction Meet Dr. Thorndyke Short Stories Percival Bland's Proxy The Missing Mortgagee The Man with the Nailed Shoes The Stranger's Latchkey The Anthropologist at Large The Blue Sequin The Moabite Cipher The Mandarin's Pearl The Aluminium Dagger A Message from the Deep Sea The Case of Oscar Brodski A Case of Premeditation The Echo of a Mutiny A Wastrel's Romance The Old Lag The Case of the White Footprints The Blue Scarab The New Jersey Sphinx The Touchstone A Fisher of Men The Stolen Ingots The Funeral Pyre The Puzzle Lock The Green Check Jacket The Seal of Nebuchadnezzar Phyllis Annesley's Peril A Sower of Pestilence Rex v. Burnaby A Mystery of the Sand-Hills The Apparition of Burling Court The Mysterious Visitor The Magic Casket The Contents of a Mare's Nest The Stalking Horse The Naturalist at Law Mr. Ponting's Alibi Pandora's Box The Trail of Behemoth The Pathologist to the Rescue Gleanings from the Wreckage

Eight compelling tales by "the father of the scientific detective story" feature inverted mysteries, in which crime and culprit are revealed at the outset and Dr. Thorndyke formulates evidence from subtle clues.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Dr. Thorndyke His Famous Cases" by Richard Austin Freeman. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Visiting a lonely hamlet perched on a cliff above the English coast, forensic detective Dr. John Thorndyke goes for a walk on the long, deserted beach. In the sand he finds two sets of footprints, made some hours apart. They lead to a crime scene. A man has been found stabbed through the heart, his body thrown from the cliffs above. The local police are on the hunt for clues, but Thorndyke is certain the killer's identity can be determined from the footprints in the sand. With the tide coming in, he has only a few hours to catch his man.

On a misty November night in London, Dr Thorndyke comes across an abandoned handbag in an old church. From examining the contents an address is found and so begins a mysterious trail leading to the owner and a violent murder. This delightful collection of crime stories has been written to amuse and perplex the most ardent of crime aficionados.

Dr. Thorndyke is one of the best creations of the Golden Age of British detective fiction. He is both medical doctor and barrister and the first great exponent of forensics in fiction, with an encyclopedic scientific knowledge. R. Austin Freeman was innovative in his writing too - some of his stories are divided in two: the first part describes the crime AND who did it - the second, the means of detection. In this new omnibus edition, over forty Thorndyke short stories are gathered, from The Singing Bone (a.k.a. The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke), The Great Portrait Mystery, John Thorndyke's Cases (a.k.a. Dr. Thorndyke's Cases), The Magic Casket, The Puzzle Lock and Dr. Thorndyke's Case Book (a.k.a. The Blue Scarab).

The Aluminum Dagger is a story from a series of 21 novels and 40 short stories by British author R. Austin Freeman featuring the investigations of the brilliant detective Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke. This time he has to deal with murder behind the doors locked inside, and the only his link is an aluminum dagger shoved into the back of the victim.

A compelling collection of Dr Thorndyke mysteries in a bumper crop of Richard Austin Freeman’s fiction. Opening with ‘The Case of the White Footprints’; revealing the secrets of ‘The Blue Scarab’; and teasing all that read ‘The Stolen Ingots’, Freeman introduces some extraordinary detective stories to bamboozle the most able of minds.