History Literature / DrThorndyke

* TrueArtIsIncomprehensible: InUniverse, this is exploited by two untalented artists in ''The Stoneware Monkey'' to sell dreadful and crude work to modern art afficionados.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/freeman_dr_thorndyke_intervenes.jpg]]

Dr. John Thorndyke is the protagonist of a series of detective stories written by R. Austin Freeman and originally published between 1907 and 1942.

** Imagine there was a novel about a murder, and the cutting-edge forensic technology used to nab the apparent killer, and how such evidence can be acquired and faked with modern technology. You might think it's a cautionary tale about 3D printing or about disclosing personal information on the Internet or something. It's from ''The Red Thumb Mark'', from ''1907'', and it's about ''fingerprinting''[[note]]The first murder on Earth solved with them was only 15 years old, the first UK criminal case was only 5, and the first UK murder only 2.[[/note]] and [[TheCSIEffect how credulous juries can be when it comes to forensic evidence]], almost a hundred years before CSI first aired. These days, it's ''very'' common for fictional criminals to put someone else's prints on the evidence, or find some other way to fake the forensics.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: In stereotypical detective stories, the bad guy of the week is usually either caught, get killed trying to evade justice, or by their criminal associates. But it's not impossible for Thorndyke's target in the shorts to simply vanish.

* AluminumChristmasTrees: In ''Mr. Pottermack's Oversight'', a character is able to obtain human remains for a substitution by buying an Egyptian mummy at auction with no paper trail, which was apparently perfectly possible in the 1930s.

* AdaptationalJerkass: In the stories adapted for the TV series ''TheRivalsOfSherlockHolmes'', Thorndyke is depicted as more aloof and arrogant than his literary counterpart.

* AdaptationalJerkass: In the stories adapted for the TV series ''The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes'', Thorndyke is depicted as more aloof and arrogant than his literary counterpart.

Adaptations of the Thorndyke stories are few and far between. A TV adaptation from 1964 is [[MissingEpisode entirely lost except the pilot]]. Two stories, ''A Message from the Deep Sea'' and ''The Moabite Cypher'', were adapted for the 1970s ITV series "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes", with Thorndyke played by John Neville and Barrie Ingham respectively. More recently (2011) there have been radio adaptations on Creator/TheBBC.

** Imagine there was a novel about a murder, and the cutting-edge forensic technology used to nab the apparent killer, and how such evidence can be acquired and faked with modern technology. You might think it's a cautionary tale about 3D printing or about disclosing personal information on the Internet or something. It's from ''The Red Thumb Mark'', from ''1907'', and it's about ''fingerprinting''[[note]]The first murder on Earth solved with them was only 15 years old, the first UK criminal case was only 5, and the first UK murder only 2.[[/note]] and [[TheCSIEffect how credulous juries can be when it comes to forensic evidence]], almost a hundred years before CSI first aired. These days, it's ''very'' common for fictional criminals to put someone else's prints on the evidence.
** The story also makes fun of how implausible and how much guesswork the SherlockScan is...but the guess turns out to be accidentally correct. These days, the Scan, parodies and criticisms, and general riffs on it are all quite common, including in actual Holmes adaptations.