Volume II contains roughly the first half of the Thorndyke Short Stories. In all, there are over forty Thorndyke short stories, spread over six books. This volume contains the fifteen short stories from the first three, John Thorndyke’s Cases, The Singing Bone, and The Great Portrait Mystery.

Some of the stories in this book are especially famous, as they were the first use of the inverted mystery, in which the criminal (and how he did it) are identified from the first, and the second half of the narrative shows how Thorndyke solves it, in spite of the criminal’s every effort. (The inverted crime story was later used to great success by Columbo, as well as other detectives.)

In addition to these fifteen stories, this book also contains a couple of Apocrypal Thorndyke tales:

The original novella of 31, New Inn from 1905, which became The Mystery of 31 New Inn, the third Thorndyke novel from 1912. This is the doctor’s true first appearance - written and published several years before the appearance of The Red Thumb Mark (1907), which is commonly believed to be Thorndyke’s first published adventure; and
The Dead Hand (1912), which later became the revised and expanded Thorndyke novel The Shadow of the Wolf (1925).

Join us as these handsome new editions bring back one of the truly great detectives who has been neglected for far too long.

Freeman was eminently successful in creating, in Thorndyke, a noble, highly convincing and thoroughly consistent character who was precisely fitted to his role.

• Norman Donaldson, Thorndyke Scholar In Search of Dr. Thorndyke (1971)