The Singing Bone [Paperback]

Richard Austin Freeman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 2008

In the topsy turvy world of The Singing Bone, Richard Austin Freeman presents us with a solution. The reader is asked to deduce how different mysteries were solved rather than whodunit. Freeman introduces five distinct tales of intrigue, romance, mutiny and murder. The ingenuity of these detective stories lies in their fresh and original approach in what amounts to a tantalising read.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In the conventional "detective story" the interest is made to focus on the question, "Who did it?" The identity of the criminal is a secret that is jealously guarded up to the very end of the book, and its disclosure forms the final climax.

This I have always regarded as somewhat of a mistake. In real life, the identity of the criminal is a question of supreme importance for practical reasons; but in fiction, where no such reasons exist, I conceive the interest of the reader to be engaged chiefly by the demonstration of unexpected consequences of simple actions, of unsuspected causal connections, and by the evolution of an ordered train of evidence from a mass of facts apparently incoherent and unrelated. The reader's curiosity is concerned not so much with the question "Who did it?" as with the question "How was the discovery achieved?" That is to say, the ingenious reader is interested more in the intermediate action than in the ultimate result.

The offer by a popular author of a prize to the reader who should identify the criminal in a certain "detective story," exhibiting as it did the opposite view, suggested to me an interesting question.

Would it be possible to write a detective story in which from the outset the reader was taken entirely into the author's confidence, was made an actual witness of the crime and furnished with every fact that could possibly be used in its detection? Would there be any story left when the reader had all the facts? I believed that there would; and as an experiment to test the justice of my belief, I wrote "The Case of Oscar Brodski." Here the usual conditions are reversed; the reader knows everything, the detective knows nothing, and the interest focuses on the unexpected significance of trivial circumstances.
--R Autin Freeman

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

R. Austin Freeman is the doyen of the scientific division of detective writing, is best known for his character Dr John Thorndyke. A close and careful investigator and the outstanding medical authority in the field of detective fiction, R. Austin Freeman not only tested the wits of the reader but also inspired many modern detective forensic methods. Much of his long life was spent as a physician and surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital, London. He also held posts in West Africa and later was a medical officer at Holloway Prison. The most famous of the Edwardian detective writers, he rescued the detective story from "thrillerdom" and made it acceptable to a more discerning class of reader.

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: House of Stratus (September 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0755103785
• ISBN-13: 978-0755103782
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,503,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The Signing Bone - A Century Old Classic that Inspired Columbo, February 16, 2012

By 

Michael P. Naughton "Author of Deathryde: Reb... (Beverly Hills, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Singing Bone (Paperback)

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.