The Blue Scarab

• ‘Perfect stories of scientific deduction’ THE NEW YORK TIMES. • ‘The Ace of Detectives’ THE TIMES. • Includes all illustrations from the original edition, critical to the plot. Detective and forensic scientist Dr John Thorndyke, together with his lab-bound sidekick, Nathaniel Polton, investigate a series of crimes – equipped with his signature green travelling research case packed with test tubes, spirit lamp and dwarf microscope. Thorndyke uses his knowledge of medical conditions, hieroglyphs, dust particles, natural history and the specific gravity of metal to solve seven ingenious cases: The Blue Scarab; The Case of the White Foot-Prints; The New Jersey Sphinx; The Touchstone; A Fisher of Men; The Stolen Ingots and The Funeral Pyre. THE BLUE SCARAB is the third of five short story collections featuring R. Austin Freeman’s greatest literary creation, the handsome and brilliant Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke, and published during the author’s lifetime. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Richard Austin Freeman was born in London in 1862. The youngest of five children and from a humble background, he first tried his hand as an apothecary and then studied medicine at Middlesex Hospital. Unable to afford to buy a practice he joined the Colonial Service and served in Africa. He was forced to return to England seven years later after contracting blackwater fever and began writing fiction in 1902. There followed a long series of DR THORNDYKE crime books (21 novels and 40 short stories), including some of the first ‘inverted’ detective stories, where the identity of the criminal is revealed at the outset and the story then describes the detective’s attempt to solve the mystery. A member of the DETECTION CLUB, Freeman’s contemporaries held him in high esteem as a pioneering detective writer. Conan Doyle may have created the first great detective, but Freeman was arguably the father of the modern detective story. He died in 1943. PRAISE FOR R. AUSTIN FREEMAN: ‘Austin Freeman is a wonderful performer… he has no equal in his genre’ RAYMOND CHANDLER; ‘Freeman developed the detective story into a carefully written and constructed genre that educated people could read with pleasure’ DOROTHY L. SAYERS, THE SUNDAY TIMES; ‘The Thorndyke books rank among the very best of modern detective fiction’ S.S. VAN DINE; ‘The first major scientific detective of the twentieth century… [Freeman’s] obsessive devotion to accurate detail set him head and shoulders above American contemporaries’ MARTIN EDWARDS, ‘THE STORY OF CLASSIC CRIME IN 100 BOOKS’.