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Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke


HerlockSholmes

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I just thought that I’d post  recommendation for anyone who likes a bit of crime fiction. 

The similarities between Dr Thorndyke and Sherlock Holmes are fairly obvious but the character is certainly no pale imitation. R. Austin Freeman wrote over 60 short stories and novels using his hero the Medical Detective Dr Thorndyke of 5a Kings Bench Walk, London (an address I’ve walked past many times....number 9 was once where Jack the Ripper suspect Montague John Druitt had quarters) The doctor is assisted by his colleague Jervis and his lab assistant Polton. The stories were written between 1907 and 1942 and although no dates are mentioned in the 5 short stories that I’ve read I’d certainly say Edwardian era. 

Freeman was known to have been much more concerned with accuracy than Doyle was; especially on matters of science but don’t get put off by thinking that these are dry, science-heavy stories because they aren’t. I really enjoyed the 5 stories that I read and I’ll be looking for more. Collections all appear to be hard to come by at the moment and I’m not keen on the idea of buying them individually. Thorndyke is, like Holmes, a bachelor but no mistruster of women. Theres appears to be no ‘darker side’ to Thorndyke that I can see so far. He’s polite, genial and gets on well with police. So yes he’s not as big a ‘character’ as Holmes. Less depth you might say. Nevertheless if you enjoy a good detective story I’d thoroughly recommend Dr Thorndyke.

A word of warning though. The book that I bought was Dr Thorndyke Investigates. It’s a collection of 5 shorts issued by Oxford City Press in 2011. This must have been proof read by a 10 year old! So many errors. ‘Of’ instead of ‘off.’ ‘Forever’ written as two words. As soon as I saw the book I could tell that it was a very basic, economy issue but that’s no excuse for so many errors.

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On 9/18/2020 at 3:15 PM, HerlockSholmes said:

This must have been proof read by a 10 year old! So many errors. ‘Of’ instead of ‘off.’ ‘Forever’ written as two words.

That's odd -- I've seen "for ever" before, and thought it was an acceptable (possibly even standard) British spelling.

 

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10 minutes ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

That's odd -- I've seen "for ever" before, and thought it was an acceptable (possibly even standard) British spelling.

I've seen it too, but I thought it was an antiquated form, like words that used to be hyphenated (to-night, good-bye, etc.).  I think it once functioned similarly to how we still use "some time" vs. "sometime", but "for ever" basically dropped out of use and was just replaced with "forever" in every case.

 

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4 minutes ago, Artemis said:

I thought it was an antiquated form, like words that used to be hyphenated (to-night, good-bye, etc.).  I think it once functioned similarly to how we still use "some time" vs. "sometime", but "for ever" basically dropped out of use and was just replaced with "forever" in every case.

Could be.  I'm pretty sure you're right about it going back farther in time, but not so sure about its current status.

OK, the Collins Dictionary makes a bit of a distinction, and also shows "for ever" declining in use over time, but says either form is acceptable.

 

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Maybe forever wasn’t so bad then. I can’t remember some of the others but they were howlers. There was one where the word ‘the’ was replaced by a completely different word. 

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4 hours ago, HerlockSholmes said:

There was one where the word ‘the’ was replaced by a completely different word. 

Sounds like Autocorrect Syndrome to me.

The problem probably started with a typo.  When typical autocorrect software detects a non-word, it will consider several possibilities: for example, the human may have rearranged the letters, or may have struck a key next to the intended one, or may have omitted a letter, or may have struck an extra key.  Taking all of these into consideration, it looks for the closest match in its list of real words -- and sometimes guesses wrong.  So it doesn't pay to trust your autocorrect completely; the results still need to be checked by a literate human -- if you can find one.

 

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  • 4 months later...

The complete works have been put out there in separate volumes by David Marcum but I’ve bought the complete works on Kindle for around £5. I’m really enjoying them. The short stories you can dip into when you have 30 minutes free.

There were also 2 volumes called The Rivals Of Sherlock Holmes involving cases by other detectives written by various authors which was made into a tv series. One of them was a Thorndyke mystery where he was played by John Neville who played Holmes in A Study In Terror which was based on a Holmes vs Jack The Ripper novel. I’ve always thought that Neville made a very good Holmes and it’s a pity he never played the detective more although he was offered the part in a tv series but commitments caused him to turn it down and the part went to Peter Cushing. Seeing Neville play Thorndyke is just like seeing him play Holmes again. There’s a scene where his friend Jervis is looking at him as he examines a slide on his microscope. It could easily have been Holmes and Watson.

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