cimorene

"Now Thorndyke is going to enjoy himself. To him, a perfectly unintelligible will is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever; especially if associated with some kind of recondite knavery."

- The Eye of Osiris

"Good," said Thorndyke. "There is no wrong time for a queer case. Let me hang up my hat and fill my pipe and then you can proceed to make my flesh creep."

- The D'Arblay Mystery

"I wonder if he really does know," said Bundy, as we walked away past the Customs watch-house.

"We can fairly take it that he doesn't," said Thorndyke, "seeing that the matter is beyond human calculation."

- The Mystery of Angelina Frood

As Thorndyke took his place in the box I looked at him with a sense of unreasonable surprise, feeling that I had never before fully realised what manner of man my friend was as to his externals. I had often noted the quiet strength of his face, its infinite intelligence, its attractiveness and magnetism; but I had never before appreciated what now impressed me most: that Thorndyke was actually the handsomest man I had ever seen. He was dressed simply, his appearance unaided by the flowing gown or awe-inspiring wig, and yet his presence dominated the court. Even the judge, despite his scarlet robe and trappings of office, looked commonplace by comparison, while the jurymen, who turned to look at him, seemed like beings of an inferior order. It was not alone the distinction of the tall figure, erect and dignified, nor the power and massive composure of his face, but the actual symmetry and comeliness of the face itself that now arrested my attention; a comeliness that made it akin rather to some classic mask, wrought in the ivory-toned marble of Pentelicus, than to the eager faces that move around us in the hurry and bustle of a life at once strenuous and trivial.

- The Red Thumb Mark

A glance at the tablet told me that this was the famous rest-house established in the sixteenth century by worthy Richard Watts, to give a night's lodging and entertainment to six poor travellers, with the express proviso that the said travellers must be neither rogues nor proctors. I had read through the quaint inscription and was speculating, as many others have speculated, on the nature of Richard Watts's grievance against proctors as a class, when the door opened suddenly and a man rushed out with such impetuosity that he nearly collided with me.

- The Mystery of Angelina Frood

At this moment the little brass knocker [...] uttered a timid and apologetic rat-tat.

- The Red Thumb-Mark

"My merits are grossly undervalued by a stiff-necked and obtuse generation. But what would you have, my learned brother? If poverty steps behind you and claps the occulting bushel over your thirty thousand candle-power luminary, your brilliancy is apt to be obscured."

- The Red Thumb-Mark

As I mentioned in a post about my recent reading a while ago, the Dr Thorndyke books are classic English detective mysteries written from 1907-1940s, and their distinguishing feature is that the sleuth, Dr Thorndyke, is a professional medical expert witness - a "medico-judicial practitioner", who is both a medical doctor and a lawyer. In practice, this means that there's a bit of a "CSI Edwardian London" slant to the books, although the much more limited technologies available to them necessarily mean that there's a large amount of overlap with non-expert-witness sleuths' methods.

Thorndyke himself is described as a distinguished, handsome and intelligent eternal bachelor who is smarter than everybody else in the room, and kind of gloats about it a little bit, but restrainedly and patiently; and rather than dropping hints or preserving a dignified silence like Poirot, he tends to explicitly admit that he knows something and categorically refuse to say what it is, instead telling the poor narrator that they have the same facts available to them and Thorndyke has merely made some 'obvious' deduction, and encourage the guy to think about it more himself and see if he figures it out. Which... is pretty hilarious tbh. Unlike Holmes and Poirot, he never seems to have a presupposition that he just naturally understands everything better than everybody else because they aren't smart enough to make the same deductions... but at the same time, he evidently has the same body of evidence as they have had (that is, nobody else ever figures it out) and might just as well have come to the same conclusion.

The great man has two sidekicks, a devoted manservant who is also a polymath savant and does all the lab tech stuff for him but also all the cook and housekeeper stuff for him; and an assistant, a younger doctor, who only appears in a few of the books; in general, each book is narrated by a new character, and they are all younger medical doctors who know Dr Thorndyke as one of their professors at medical school.

They're also all romances, which is a strong trend in golden age detective novels, but the fact that these are all romances from the male perspective is a bit unusual. (Not, like, feminist or fantastic or anything - they're not horribly misogynist, but the author hints once or twice that he subscribes to the ludicrous sexist images of suffragists, for example, even though he also portrays a variety of intelligent heroines who earn their livings in various different ways.)

I'm quite enjoying them in spite of a lot of the characters and particularly the young male narrators being somewhat overly clueless/stupid/slow/reckless/foolish; being behind the sleuth is expected, and they can't know everything, but they should still probably be able to deduce after someone tries to kill them that taking precautions about being followed, or assassinated, would be a good idea. The mysteries themselves and the portraits of Edwardian London continue to engage. The novels are in the public domain too, and can be handily obtained in ebook format from, for example, Project Gutenberg Australia.