Mr Pottermack’s Oversight T by R Austin Freeman – Review

By Sarah Morgan

Here’s a neat little fact for you: the Columbo TV series came about because American TV executives couldn’t afford (or refused) to pay for the rights to George Simenon’s beloved Inspector Maigret, prompting screenwriting duo Richard Levinson and William Link to devise their own sharp-witted, overcoat and fedora-wearing detective.

But Peter Falk’s most famous alter-ego also owes something to R Austin Freeman. The esteemed British crime writer is credited with being the inventor of the ‘inverted detective story’, ie a tale that begins with the offence, often giving away the perpetrator, before going on to explain how and why they did it.

Mr Pottermack’s Oversight was not the first example, but it is one of Freeman’s best and most famous entries in the genre. And now we can all enjoy its intriguing delights thanks to its reissue as part of the British Library’s Crime Classics series.

Mr Pottermack is a seemingly well-off, respectable gentleman living on the outskirts of a Buckinghamshire town. However, he’s hiding a secret – many years earlier, he escaped from prison while serving a sentence for a crime he did not commit. The authorities believed him to be dead, allowing him to start a new and lucrative life in America.

“Thoroughly entertaining”

He returned to England to track down the woman he loved. Unfortunately, while doing so, Lewson, the former friend who framed him, recognised him and launched a blackmail plot. Mr Pottermack is delighted when the villain subsequently falls down a well and is killed.

As a search for Lewson begins, Pottermack goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure his disappearance can’t be linked to him, but Freeman’s regular detective, Dr Thorndyke, soon realises that something fishy is going on…

By 1930, when the book was first published, Thorndyke was a wily old campaigner, a medical doctor-turned-lawyer who uses both professions to get to the bottom of tricky cases. Mr Pottermack’s is certainly intriguing, and watching him piece it all together from various scraps of information is a delight. However, I do think that if Thorndyke was really such a wonderful detective, he’d have got to the bottom of the mystery a whole lot faster than he does.

But that’s a small quibble; this is a thoroughly entertaining tale, something cosy and comforting as the nights draw in.

And, to paraphrase the aforementioned Columbo, there’s just one more thing – the tome includes another informative introduction from series editor Martin Edwards.

‘Mr Pottermack’s Oversight’ T by R Austin Freeman is published by the British Library