The blue scarab

About the book

The title case begins with a theft during a conveniently timed fire: a deed-box disappears, then nearly all its contents return, leaving a blue scarab conspicuously absent. Thorndyke's interest in the object challenges the owner's assumption that it has little value or significance. The other six stories include The Case of the White Foot-Prints, The New Jersey Sphinx, The Touchstone, A Fisher of Men, The Stolen Ingots, and The Funeral Pyre. Together they display an investigator who combines specialist knowledge with disciplined attention to what witnesses overlook. The pleasures differ from a single long pursuit, as each case supplies a new arrangement of appearances and material facts. This 1924 collection offers compact examples of Freeman's medico-legal detective method without reducing detection to intuition alone.

• Observation and evidence
• Specialist knowledge
• Misleading appearances

Why read it

The changing cases show how an apparently incidental physical detail can reorganize the entire question under investigation.

English seven-story collection, Dodd, Mead 1924