R. Austin Freeman - A Certain Dr Thorndyke

In this novel one man on a ship to Africa buries his friend and assume his identity. Then he finds on the journey home a nice girl and fall in love with her. But he is also a criminal and wants to escape the law, although he isn't quite a criminal, because his sister father stole the gems, and in the process of events, after careful investigation by Dr Thorndyke they are in no worry of arresting. R. Austin Freeman (1862 - 1943) was an inventor of inverted detective story, when we see the crime first and the following of criminal, and in the second part investigation of inspector. R. Austin Freeman was best known for his novels about forensic doctor-investigator Dr Thorndyke and is probably progenitor of all these modern forensic crime writers. Raymond Chandler praised his work, writing in a letter to Hamish Hamilton : "This man Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer. He has no equal in his genre and he is also a much better writer than you might think, if you were superficially inclined, because in spite of the immense leisure of his writing he accomplishes an even suspense which is quite unexpected."

He also wrote an essay The Art Of The Detective Story, in which he said : "The reader had seen the crime committed, knew all about the criminal, and was in possession of all the facts. It would have seemed that there was nothing left to tell, but I calculated that the reader would be so occupied with the crime that he would overlook the evidence. And so it turned out. The second part, which described the investigation of the crime, had to most readers the effect of new matter."

Freeman paid a great deal of attention to details, and carried out the experiments described in his books to ensure that they worked and would give the expected results. He also went to the trouble of visiting the places he wrote about so that the details in his descriptions were correct.

De Balcam says that "Freeman displays a mastery of craftsmanship" in every story, and that he always used the language of the trade concerned. Freeman is "a man who writes of things that he has seen, handled and understood, and not of things that he has met only in print, or in a hazy, inattentive observation". This is a critical aspect of Freeman - he tested the methods he used.