R. Austin Freeman

Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943) was an English writer of detective fiction, born in London, who qualified as a doctor and served as a colonial surgeon on the Gold Coast until fever sent him home. He created Dr. John Thorndyke, a lawyer and physician who solves crimes by laboratory science, in The Red Thumb Mark (1907), and wrote about him in some forty books, among them The Eye of Osiris and Helen Vardon's Confession. He invented the "inverted" detective story, in which the reader watches the crime committed and then follows the detective reconstructing it. He performed many of Thorndyke's experiments himself before putting them in print.