When a man's body is found drowned in a shallow ditch, it seems a clear case of suicide. But there are several puzzling features: why did he travel miles from home from an area where he was unknown, and how did he get there? Dr. John Thorndyke is asked by the man's brother to investigate, and he soon becomes convinced there is more to the case than meets the eye...

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.

Freeman continued writing throughout his career, despite suffering the onset of Parkinson's disease in later life. He briefly paused his output at the start of the second world war in 1939 – before resuming writing in an air raid shelter in his garden. He died aged 81 at his home in Gravesend, Kent, in September 1943.

'The Naturalist at Law' was first printed in Flynn's Weekly, a popular pulp magazine, on 11 December 1926. It later appeared in book form in the compilation volume 'The Famous Cases of Dr. Thorndyke', published in 1929.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2022.

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