Edwardian forensic scientist Dr. John Thorndyke investigates the baffling murder of a man found in a locked room, stabbed in the back by a most unusual weapon...
A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.
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Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943) was born in London and trained in medicine at the Middlesex Hospital. After a spell as a house surgeon, he joined the Colonial Service and spent some years working in Africa. He was invalided home with blackwater fever in 1891. Returning to London he worked as an ear, nose and throat specialist, as well as in general practice and, for a time, as Medical Officer at Holloway Prison. He began writing fiction in the early 1900s, initially under the pseudonym "Clifford Ashdown", including the Romney Pringle stories which were serialised in Cassell's Magazine in 1902. Five years later, under his own name, he wrote 'The Red Thumb Mark', the novel which introduced the character of Dr. John Thorndyke.
Thorndyke is a self-described "medical jurispractitioner", having given up practice as a medical doctor to train in the law, and established himself as what is now known as a forensic scientist. He is accompanied in his investigations by his friend and colleague Dr. Christopher Jervis, who narrates the adventures. Of all the many "rivals" to Sherlock Holmes who appeared in fiction at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Thorndyke and Jervis partnership is perhaps the closest parallel to the world of Holmes and Watson. The similarities are underscored both by the original illustrators who depicted Thorndyke very much in the mould of Holmes and also by the casting of John Neville as Thorndyke in a 1971 television adaptation of one of his adventures (Neville played Holmes in the 1965 film 'A Study in Terror', as well as on stage in William Gillette's play). Making his first appearance four years after Holmes's 1903 retirement to Sussex to keep bees, Thorndyke takes on the mantle of Holmes for the next generation, and with his medico-legal training is well equipped for the modern scientific advances of the new century. He appeared in 21 novels and 40 short stories between 1907 and 1942.
'The Aluminium Dagger' first appeared in the 1909 volume 'John Thorndyke's Cases'; it was subsequently published in the July 1910 edition of McClure's Magazine.
A note on the text: This narration uses the magazine text of this story, as it appeared in McClure's Magazine in 1910. Listeners who like to "follow along with the book" may notice that the text which appears in some anthologies and in the collected Thorndyke stories differs noticeably in several places, although the basic story is the same. For reference, the original text as read here can be found at the following link: https://archive.org/details/TheAluminumDagger/mode/2up
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.