Hi, my name is Ross but I go by the moniker rcool. I have been a volunteer with Distributed Proofreaders Canada (DPC), the organization that provides public-domain eBooks to Faded Page since its beginnings in December 2007. I have been involved in many aspects of the DPC community and currently do proofing and posting of eBooks to Faded Page. When you participate in DPC, you get exposed to a wide range of books and publications.

The author I want to speak about today is Richard Austin Freeman, from England, who wrote a number of books but is well known mostly for a series of books featuring the fictitious Dr. Thorndyke. Currently we have 37 of his Thorndyke Mystery books at Faded Page for your perusal.

To help explain the mysteries, Wikipedia’s “Dr. Thorndyke” page says: “Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke is a fictional detective in a long series of 21 novels and 40 short stories by British author R. Austin Freeman (1862 1943). Thorndyke was described by his author as a ‘medical jurispractitioner’: originally a medical doctor, he turned to the bar and became one of the first-Min modern parlance—forensic scientists. His solutions were based on his method of collecting all possible data (including dust and pond weed) and making inferences from them before looking at any of the protagonists and motives in the crimes. (Freeman, it is said, conducted all experiments mentioned in the stories himself.) It is this method which gave rise to one of Freeman’s most ingenious inventions, the inverted detective story, where the criminal act is described first and the interest lies in Thorndyke’s subsequent unravelling of it.”

Of course your choices may not match mine, and that’s fine as there are lots of eBooks to choose from! If you want to check out any of our Richard Austin Freeman books then go to this page.

If you like what we do here on Faded Page and want to help us add even more public domain books to the site, come join us and proofread a few pages. For more information about how to volunteer, check out our companion site, Distributed Proofreaders Canada.