JACQUES FUTRELLE – Best “Thinking Machine” Stories. Dover, softcover, 1973.

   The career of Jacques Futrelle was heroically cut short by his choice of holiday transportation — he sailed aboard the Titanic. Before that, however, he created one of the most notable eccentric detectives in crime history, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen (with plenty of degrees after his name), “the Thinking Machine.”

   The professor is a famous scientist with an enormous, domelike head (he wears a hat size 8); a wilderness of straw-yellow hair; and squinty, watery blue eyes. He has thick spectacles, long white hands, and a small body. His henchman and gofer is Hutchison Hatch. a newspaper reporter. Most of the Thinking Machine’s cases arc brought to him by Hatch, who knows that to get a good story, one brings it to the man who can get to the bottom of an “impossible crime.”

   The professor, in the fine tradition of armchair detectives, knows that any puzzle has a logical explanation. His sententious principle is “two and two always make four — not sometime but all the time.” Much of the legwork is done by Hatch off stage; the professor himself is a phone fanatic — he often goes into his little phone room and returns with the complete solution.

   The Best “Thinking Machine” Detective Stories are a dozen collected from The Thinking Machine (1906), which contains seven stories, and The Thinking Machine on the Case ( 1907). Two of Futrelle’s tales were shown on public television in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

   The Thinking Machine was introduced in a story, much anthologized, called “The Problem of Cell 13.” From a simple arguing point, a challenge is proposed. The professor undertakes, on purely scientific grounds, to escape from a death cell in the penitentiary in one week. And does so.

   Other stories contain puzzles about dying messages, perfect alibis, buried treasure, and an occult legacy. Excellent “locked-room” variations are presented in “The Stolen Rubens,” “The Phantom Motor,” and “The Lost Radium.” Another, “Kidnapped Baby Blake, Millionaire,” where a person vanishes from footprints in a snow-filled yard, is not quite up to snuff.

   In “The Missing Necklace,” the crook is about to give Scotland Yard the bird except for the intervention of the Thinking Machine. He is able to sum up one case thus: “The subtler murders — that is, the ones which are most attractive as problems — are nearly always the work of a cunning woman. I know nothing about women myself.”  Shades of Sherlock Holmes.

———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.