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The Singing Bone

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Published in 1912 - The Signing Bone celebrates 100 years and is still like the penultimate Sherlock Holmes and, unfortunately overshadowed and often overlooked. R. Austin Freeman was responsible for engineering the original "inverted detective story" or the "howdhecatchem."

In these 5 stories or cases, each are divided into two parts:

1) the commission of the crime and
2) the solution of the crime

We become so embroiled in the crime that, like the perp, overlook the evidence.
Like Holmes, the locale is London, but unlike Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke is a Medico-Legal Sleuth of sorts. Freeman insists that "Dr. Thorndyke is an investigator of crime, but he-is-not-a-detective."

Freeman's inverted detective formula was the impetus and inspiration for Columbo Columbo - The Complete First Season with Peter Falk in the 70s.

The title is derived from the German folk-story of the Signing Bone where a peasant found a bone of a murdered man and fashioned it into a pipe but when he tried to play on it, it burst into a song of it's own.

Dr. Thorndyke concludes that it's "the inanimate things around us have each of them a song to sing to us if we are but ready with attentive ears."

I know I am. Here's to another 100 years R. Austin Freeman, may the Bone continue to sing.