Tom Wolfe and James M. Cain
For many crime fiction fans James M. Cain will always be remembered for four seminal crime novels: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Serenade, Mildred Pierce and Double Indemnity. The story of his career after these works is a sad one of bad reviews, works going out of print, historical research which led to nothing and publishers turning their back on him. Then, in 1965, help came from an unlikely source. In a review of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, Tom Wolfe, the distinguished novelist and founder of the New Journalism, compared Mailer’s writing unfavourably to Cain’s:
Of course, Mailer cannot match Cain in writing dialogue, creating characters, setting up scenes or carrying characters through a long story. But he is keener than Cain in summoning up smells, especially effluvia. I think Norman Mailer can climb into the same ring as James M. Cain. He’s got to learn some fundamentals, such as how to come out of the corner faster. But that can be picked up. A good solid Cain-style opener goes like this:
“They threw me off the hay truck about noon….”
Although Wolfe’s praise did not lead to any significant reversal of fortune for Cain, it did contribute to the emergence of scholarly studies of Cain, who gradually has become recognised as one of the greatest and most important American Hardboiled crime writers. Ironically, Cain hated this genre label, and it was his attempt to break free of it that led to his career decline. By suggesting that an all-but-forgotten crime novelist is a better writer than a fashionable but (let’s face it) tedious and verbose literary figure, Wolfe implied that a genre writer can transcend the limitations of his genre whilst still being naturally recognised as a crime writer. To make this point, Wolfe quoted the now famous opening of The Postman Always Rings Twice, a novel which was an influence on Albert Camus’ The Stranger and on many film noirs of the 1940s and 50s. It might be tempting to write off Wolfe’s words as merely part of the endless and entertaining series of literary feuds that regularly occurred between authors such as Wolfe, Mailer, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and John Updike, but Wolfe showed genuine appreciaton for Cain as his 1969 introduction to the Cain omnibus Cain x3 clearly shows. In it, Wolfe sincerely captures the joy of reading Cain and his power as a novelist:
Cain was one of those writers who first amazed me and delighted me when I was old enough to start looking around and seeing what was being done in American literature… I can see how complex Cain’s famous ‘fast-paced’ ‘hard-boiled’ technique really is.
HRF Keating 1926-2011
H.R.F. Keating, one of the grand old men of the British crime and detective fiction community, and a notable detective novelist in his own right, died today. What follows is the piece I wrote about him for the forthcoming 100 British Crime Writers book. He’s a sad loss to the crime and detective fiction community.
Author of over 50 books, including the popular and acclaimed Inspector Ghote series of detective novels, formerly a journalist, and crime fiction reviewer for the The Times newspaper (London). Although a British-based writer, Keating is notable for having set his most successful work in India, Inspector Ghote being an officer of the Bombay (Mumbai) Police. Along with Julian Symons, Keating was an important crime and detective fiction book reviewer in the 1960s and 1970s; he was the author of books about Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, and How To Write Crime Fiction (1986).
H.R.F. Keating—known as Harry—was born on October 31, 1926, in St. Leonards on Sea, East Sussex and attended Merchant Taylor’s School, London, before reading Modern Languages at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1953 he married Sheila Mitchell, with whom he had four children. In 1956 the couple moved to London, where Keating became a journalist with the Daily Telegraph. He later moved to The Times, where he was the crime fiction reviewer for 15 years. Keating was encouraged to write and publish his stories by his wife, and his first published novel, the surreal Death and the Visiting Firemen, appeared in 1959.
Inspector Ganesh Ghote
Inspector Ghote first appeared in the 1964 novel The Perfect Murder, which won the Crime Writers’ Association’s (CWA) prestigious Gold Dagger Award in Britain and the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the United States. It was Keating’s sixth published novel and those that came before were successful in Britain. In their Good Reading Guide to Murder (1990), Kenneth and Valerie MacLeish describe books like Death and the Visiting Fireman (set in a firefighting conference) and Zen There Was Murder (set on a retreat for Zen Buddhists) as “brilliant spoofs.” But these books did not translate well to American audiences and were never published in the United States.
Keating began working on the Inspector Ghote books partly as a response to this sense of being ‘too English.’ In search of somewhere exotic as a setting for his next story Keating reported sitting down with an Atlas and picking India almost on a whim. The Perfect Murder was an almost immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic, and Ghote featured in a series of books published more or less annually for the next 15 years.
Ghote’s bankability as a character is evident in the titles published in the 1960s and early 1970s: Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade (1966), Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes (1967), Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock (1968), and so on. Keating’s novels were also popular in India, but it is worth noting that he did not visit the country for the first time until ten years after the publication of the first Ghote novel. Until then his only experience of India was from research; after his visit he claimed to have found writing the books more difficult.
Julian Symons, who categorised Keating, in Bloody Murder (1985), as an ‘entertainer’ nevertheless thought highly of him as a writer, and believed he had been ‘hampered’ by Ghote, and prevented from developing in more interesting directions. Symons gives The Murder of the Maharajah (1980), a non-Ghote mystery which earned Keating his second Golden Dagger, as an example, and says that it ‘shows what Keating can do when free of Ghote’ (Symons, 1985: 190).
From the late 1970s Keating wrote Ghote novels more intermittently, in between standalone novels and other series. In 1978 he published an apocalyptic science fiction novel, A Long Walk to Wimbledon, and between 1984 and 1986 he published three novels as Evelyn Hervey. From 2000 he pursued his Harriett Martens series about a female Detective Inspector in the British police force, and in 2008 returned to Inspector Ghote, with a prequel, Inspector Ghote’s First Case, and, in 2009, A Small Case for Inspector Ghote?
Nonfiction
Keating’s non-fiction has been similarly influential. In 1977 his book Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime was the first book about Christie to appear after her death, while Writing Crime Fiction (1986) remains a perceptive and important guide to writing in the genre. In 1987 Keating published Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, containing short critical pieces on the 100 books Keating thought were the best in the genre up to that point. In terms of influence Keating’s list was equivalent to that drawn up by Symons for the Times thirty years earlier. Yet despite his success, Keating’s work never made the transition from book to television or film in a significant way. Of Keating’s more than 50 novels, only one, The Perfect Murder, has so far been adapted for film (by Ismail Merchant, in 1998).
Besides his writing Keating was an active member of the crime and detective writing community. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was Chairman of the Crime Writers’ Association (1970-1971), The Society of Authors (1983-1984), and was President of the Detection Club (1985-2000). In 1996 he received the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in honour of his remarkable lifetime service to crime writing.
Keating died on March 27, 2011.
Further Reading
H.R.F. Keating website. http://hrfkeating.com (accessed 24 August 2010).
Ripley, Mike. Obituary in The Guardian, March 28, 2011. Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/28/hrf-keating-obituary
Tamaya, Meera. H.R.F. Keating: Post-Colonial Detection (A Critical Study) Bowling Green (OH): Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993.
By Chris Routledge
From the Archive
It’s coming up to nearly two years since Chris and I started Venetian Vase. It has been a very rewarding experience, and I’d like to thank all of our readers and contributors. Should you be interested, I’ve pasted some links below to some of my favourite posts that Chris and I wrote when we first began the site:
This is a review of Francis Russell’s wonderful biography of Warren G. Harding, The Shadow of Blooming Grove. This book was a big influence on James Ellroy, who had planned to write a novel about Harding before abandoning the project.
Detroit in the Fiction of Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is one of my favourite crime writers, but does his work portray Detroit as compelling as city as say Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles?
Why does James Ellroy often appear to be completely crazy? This post explores Ellroy’s ‘Demon Dog’ persona and its manifestation in ‘Dog Humour’.
Bazaar Bizarre and the Demon Dogs
In 2004, James Ellroy was at a low ebb after suffering a nervous breakdown during the book tour for The Cold Six Thousand and struggling with an addiction to painkillers. He agreed to star in and narrate the documentary, Bazaar Bizarre, about Kansas City serial killer Bob Berdella. It may have been the worst decision of his career.
Louis Menand on Pynchon’s ‘Inherent Vice’
Chris takes a look at some of the lazy, tired criticisms of crime fiction. In particular, how Louis Menand’s review of Inherent Vice betrays his reductive understanding of the genre.
Lawrence Block on Donald Westlake
This one looks at the professional partnership and friendship between Block and Westlake.
Worth Going to Hell For
Following on from Diana’s piece about Film Noir, I came across an article in Obit Magazine about the femme fatale, with an interesting take on the character type. Author Kevin Nance argues that while the femme fatale disappeared from cinema in the the 1950s, her legacy can be found in “empowered ass-kickers” on TV, and in film, ever since:
She’s in trouble, she says, and needs his help. He hesitates a second while his brain tries to work. Whatever her problem is — something about her husband working her over, the sick bastard — she can take care of herself, from the looks of her. But hello, the looks of her: those long legs, those tremulous lips, those wounded eyes. This dame isn’t in trouble, she is trouble, his brain shouts — but those eyes, those eyes. He’s way past listening to his brain. The only sound he can hear is her voice, whispering that she needs him, wants him, can’t live without him. And if his brain turns out to be right, if she ends up dragging him down into depravity, madness and murder, well, tough. If there was ever a thing worth going straight to hell for, she’s it.
The Film Noir Academy Awards
Film noir is a cinematic genre which has been largely overlooked by the Oscars. To join in the fun of Sunday’s ceremony, I’d like to suggest some retrospective winners drawn from the genre of film noir. These things are always a matter of opinion, but I hope you enjoy some of the suggestions:
Best Film Noir Picture:
Touch of Evil (1958). This gripping and experimental noir is set in the fictional US/Mexico border town of Los Robles. Welles adeptly uses music and camera angles in a film more gripping than Citizen Kane and wider and more nuanced in character development. The complex meeting ground between America and Mexico is examined through an upright Mexican law enforcement officer (Charlton Heston), who is respected in his own country but made powerless on American soil, and is thwarted and framed by a corrupt sheriff on the other side (played by Welles himself). Heston’s perilous situation is parallelled with his beautiful American wife’s sexually menacing ordeal in a hotel room at the hands of a Mexican gang.
Best Film Noir Director:
Billy Wilder
Wilder was nominated for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Double Indemnity (1944) but lost out to Joseph Mankiewicz for All About Eve and Leo McCary for Going My Way, a largely forgotten musical. Wilder was such a great film noir director because he could implicitly portray the essence of a Los Angeles, the spiritual home of American film noir, in all its quirkiness and superficiality. Two distinct directorial touches stand out: the image of William Holden’s corpse floating face down in the swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard, and from Double Indemnity an unflinching close-up shot of Barbara Stanwyck’s character while her husband is being bludgeoned to death in the seat next to her. Special mention should also go to his cult classic Ace in the Hole (1951).
Best Film Noir Actor:
Robert Mitchum
Night of the Hunter. By 1955 Mitchum had already secured his image as the cool and laconic tough guy, often as a criminal, but he never appeared so amoral so as to be unsympathetic. His role as the itinerant and criminal preacher Harry Powell was inspired casting against type. Mitchum effortlessly portrays a man who is the embodiment of pure evil, preying on people’s superstitions in the backwoods of West Virginia, invoking fear of damnation in others whilst simultaneously committing crimes such as murder. His psychopathic charismatic preacher is manipulative, emotionally overwhelming but not altogether unattractive, and perhaps just deluded enough to believe his merciless theology. Mitchum’s aging Philip Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely (1975) was another outstanding noir performance and worth a mention here.
Best Film Noir Actress:
Joan Crawford
Crawford actually won the Academy Award for the title role in Mildred Pierce (1945), but it is worth mentioning again as one of the best film noir performances by an actress. Yet this was a difficult choice for me, as Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1952)deserves special mention for her complex portrayal of Laurel Grey, a woman who first provides the alibi for, but then later doubts her neighbour-turned-lover’s innocence. Crawford in Pierce is compelling as a woman whose self-sacrificial desire to give her daughter everything results in the ultimate betrayal of her affections. This is a noir more in the realist mode with the criminal elements played down for the drama of domesticity and normal life. Such material might seem unpromising but Crawford’s performance makes it compelling.
Best Film Noir Supporting Actor:
Edward G.Robinson
For his portrayal of insurance investigator Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity (1944), Robinson turns what should be the good guy of the piece into a menacing and calculating figure (as opposed to Fred MacMurray’s likable and charismatic murderer). But Robinson is more than just a threatening figure close to exposing MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck’s murderous scheme, his brilliant mind, ready wit and machine-like rhetorical delivery can be both exhilirating and funny. And in the denouement the character expresses a heretofore hidden empathy. Magic.
Best Film Noir Supporting Actress:
Thelma Ritter
Pick Up on South Street (1953). Ritter’s character’s take on ‘honour amongst thieves’, allows her to snitch on other pickpockets as a purely capitalist enterprise. But when Richard Widmark’s petty thief is sought by a coldhearted killer working for the Communists, Ritter defiantly returns to a protective position, knowing it will result in her death. Ritter was actually nominated for the role, but lost out to Donna Reed for From Here to Eternity.
Arthur Conan Doyle and the Arctic
In the Spring of 1880 Arthur Conan Doyle, then a 21 year-old medical student, sailed as ship’s surgeon on board the Hope, an Arctic whaler, out of Peterhead. The Hope was a modern vessel with an auxiliary steam engine to go with its three masts, and in his brief reminiscence about the voyage, “Whaling in the Arctic Ocean” Conan Doyle says: “What surprised me most about the Arctic regions was the rapidity with which you reach them. I had never realised that they lie at our very door. I think that we were only four days out of Shetland when we were among the drift ice.”
Doyle’s role on board ship was primarily as medical officer or surgeon, but in reality there was little for him to do but observe the scenery (and on several occasions fall into it), and to act as a companion for the ship’s captain, Captain Gray. It was customary, on board Greenland whalers, for the crew and captain to remain almost entirely separate, other than in the giving and receiving of orders, and in the captain’s briefings of harpooners and senior ship’s officers, so they often took along a companion for the seven month voyage.
Doyle concludes his short essay with the reflection that while he had stagnated intellectually during the voyage, the purity of the Arctic air had worked wonders for his physical health. But it seems to me that Doyle’s Arctic voyage, after which he completed his studies and qualified as a doctor, tells us quite a lot about his intellectual development. In particular it gives a context for the habit of observation and reflection that characterises his great literary creation, Sherlock Holmes.
By 1880 Arctic whaling was in decline. Doyle himself comments on the scarcity of “commercial” whales, notably the Bowhead whale, then known as the Greenland Right Whale, though he also mentions the relatively large numbers of Fin and Humpback whales, which were not pursued, being considered fit only for tallow. Sixty years earlier, when the whale fishery was at its peak, it was relatively common for scientists and adventurers to sail on whale ships in order to carry out experiments, or test theories. This was the tradition from which Doyle emerged, in his twenties, and it was in this spirit that he made his voyage north. Here, for instance, is his record of catching and killing seals, his rationalism overriding the horror of the slaughter, and expressing itself in terms of social criticism, for which he is not well known:
It is brutal work, though not more brutal than that which goes on to supply every dinner table in the country. And yet those glaring crimson pools upon the dazzling white of the icefields, under the peaceful silence of the Arctic sky, did seem a horrible intrusion. But an inexorable demand creates an inexorable supply, and the seals, by their death, help to give a living to the long line of seamen, dockers, tanners, curers, triers, chandlers, leather merchants and oil sellers who stand between this annual butchery on the one hand, and the exquisite, with his soft leather boots, or the savant, using a delicate oil for his philosophical instruments on the other.
But of course Doyle was also one for sensation, and there was plenty of that in the seas off Spitzbergen. On one occasion, in a boat alongside a whale in its death throes, the crew watched as the whale raised its fin high above them: “each of us held one hand up to stave off that great, threatening fin–as if any strength of ours could have availed if the whale had meant it to descend. But it was spent with loss of blood, and instead of coming down the fin rolled over the other way, and we knew that it was dead. Who would swap that moment for any other triumph that sport can give?”
Thankfully we do not speak of whaling as sport any more, but in this moment of peril, faced with the certain destruction of boat and crew, Doyle extracts a moment of thrilling terror worthy of Holmes himself. Doyle celebrated his twenty first birthday at 80 degrees north, but his claim to have come of age there had as much to do with experience as chronology. It is an intriguing thought that the death throes of a whale came close to depriving detection fiction of one of its cornerstones.
Romantic Reunion: Raymond and Cissy Chandler
Yesterday, February 14th 2011, in San Diego, California, Raymond Chandler and his wife were reunited after 57 years. When Cissy died in 1954, Chandler was too distraught to make arrangements for his wife of 30 years, who, according to Judith Freeman, was his ‘anchor, his shrine of worship, his raison d’être’. Although he was buried in Mt Hope cemetary after his death in 1959, Cissy’s cremated remains lay in storage when, in 2010, Loren Latker and others sought to reunite the pair. Yesterday’s ceremony was a celebration of their love for each other. After a jazz-enfused funeral procession, there was a grave-side ceremony, followed by a gimlet reception (Chandler’s favourite drink) at the Hilton and a celebratory dinner. Although we couldn’t attend, all of us at Venetian Vase would like to thank Latker and the others who completed and honoured their love story by reuniting the pair.
David Mamet’s The Old Religion
Leo Frank
If you ask someone to name the most unusual American crime novel they have ever read they would perhaps give you the title of something written by James Sallis, Paul Auster or Thomas Pynchon, but the most unusual novel I have read in the genre is David Mamet’s little-known The Old Religion (1997). Mamet’s rare excursion into the novel format is his dramatisation of the murder trial of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia in 1913. Frank was a Jewish factory owner who was accused of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year old caucasian gentile in his employ. In a case that gripped the nation and went to the very heart of race relations in the United States, Frank was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death, largely on the testimony of Jim Conley, a black janitor at the factory who was the police’s first suspect and is believed by many historians today to be the real killer. Unlike many crime books which are non-fiction novels, The Old Religion is not a step-by-step reenactment of the crime, case and aftermath, rather Mamet tells the story through a detailed imagining of Frank’s thought processes. In the first half of the novel, Frank spends very little time thinking about the case; instead, he turns his brilliant mind to his cold and dispassionate views on subjects such as history, religion, watchmaking and even whether or not he should discard a paperclip. But when there are no more subjects to distract himself with, Frank finally turns his thoughts to the case: he considers his attachment to the secular society which has condemned him, his anger at the Christians in the jury and the hordes outside the courtroom who are baying for his blood partly because he is Jewish, and his inability to express sorrow or emotion in the courtroom, another factor which certainly prejudiced the press’ and the public’s opinions of him. From this, Mamet has created a thrillingly dramatic and moving novel which, while almost devoid of any action, takes its drama from Frank’s interior monologue, especially the concision and exactness of each formed thought. An example of which is his analysis of the movement of an oscillating fan:
‘Each time,’ he thought, ‘the fan returns in much the same way – making the allowance for the minute but inevitable wear inside the machine; making allowance, again, for the small but, I am sure, measurable shift of the fan along the desk – although it does seem fixed. Though the foam padding on its base no doubt reduces to near nil its motion. Even so,’ he thought, ‘even so. Even so. If I left for a period of months, on my return would I not see the fan had shifted, slightly? If I had marked its position out, on my departure, would I not see, upon my return, that change? And if I could not measure it, would not an absence of years…” He cast his mind ahead, to a return to his office in decades, in centuries, in aeons, until a time when he would not be disappointed to find the fan yet unmoved.
‘For it must move,’ he thought.
‘And if it moves, yes, even after the passage of centuries, if the passage of time shows it to have moved, then it must have been in motion all the time. For a measurable jump is nothing save the aggregate of these shifts we are incompetent t0 perceive.’
Leo Frank’s sentence was commuted from the death penalty to life imprisionment. Frank was seriously wounded when he had his throat slashed by a fellow inmate at Milledgeville State Penitentiary. On the night of August 15, 1915, while recovering in the prison hospital, Frank was kidnapped by a mob of around thirty people who called themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan. The kidnappers drove Frank to Frey’s Gin, two miles east of Marietta, where they lynched him and took a photograph of the hanging corpse. Many of the Knights were alleged to been well connected in Georgia society (and some went on to play a large part in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan which happened around this time), although no criminal charges were ever brought forward for the murder of Frank, one of the ringleaders of the lynchers is reputed to have been the former Governor of Georgia Joseph Mackay Brown. As was the case with many lynchings, the photograph was reproduced as a postcard and sold in stores throughout the Deep South.
In 1986, Leo Frank was given a posthumous pardon by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, although this pardon only acknowledged the State’s culpability in Frank’s death through its failure to protect him. A full pardon and exoneration was not given due to a lack of available records which had survived the passage of time and which may have proved a wrongful conviction. Although not everyone is convinced of Leo Frank’s innocence, Mamet has created an undeniably brilliant fictional portrayal of one of the most shameful moments in America’s troubled history and a devastating critique of the system which failed to stop, and even encouraged, Leo Frank’s tragic fate.
L.A. Noire
The forthcoming relelase of the video game L.A. Noire has received a huge amount of publicity. Set in a ‘perfectly recreated Los Angeles’ of 1947 the player takes on the role of an LAPD investigator Cole Phelps who is tasked with solving a series of murders (judging by the trailer and the 1947 setting, the creators have drawn heavily from the Black Dahlia murder case). Following the release last year of David Cage’s Heavy Rain, the influence of film noir and hardboiled crime fiction can be increasingly seen in the development of video games. L.A. Noire is released in the UK on May 20th. You can watch the trailer below:
The Remarkable Life and Mysterious Heritage of Jacques Futrelle
Delphine Cingal, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris 2. She has a PhD from the Sorbonne for her research on P.D. James (Perversity and Perversion in P.D. James’s Whodunits, Presses du Septentrion, 2001.) She has been chevalier des Arts et des Lettres since 2009. She is also one of the organisers of the Week-end Noir festival in Neuilly-Plaisance, near Paris.
She is still doing research on detective fiction and has published many articles on the subject (including one on P.D. James for Clues in 2001). She is also the editor of ‘Zulma Classics’ (classics published in English for Zulma, a Paris publisher). She has organized two international conferences in 2005, one on detective fiction at the Catholic Institute (Paris) and one on Text and Image at Senate House (London). She is currently planning another one for Senate House in 2011 and creating an international detective fiction research center in France.
Jacques Futrelle
Jacques Futrelle (John Heath Futrell) was born on April 9th, 1875 (some sources now state 1873) in Pike County, Georgia, and died on April 15th, 1912 on board the RMS Titanic. His father was Harmon Heath Futrell, a teacher in Atlanta, and his mother was Linnie Bevill Futrell.
He was sent to the Pike County school, but was also taught at home by his father who taught him French among other things. The legend goes that the family was of French Huguenot descent but the name was in fact Futrell, and therefore English. According to his grandson Robert, he was born John Futrell. Here is a link which references a Futrell-Heath marriage. He adopted the name Jacques Futrelle as a literary pseudonym.
Futrelle’s initial career was as a journalist, but what gained him fame was his invention of famous literary detective Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, ‘Ph. D., LL. D., F. R. S., M. D., etc., etc., etc.’, best known as ‘The Thinking Machine’ for his indomitable use of logic. ‘The Thinking Machine’ is a rather eccentric intellectual whose behaviour often appears to outsiders to be rather arrogant. He has a sidekick in his investigations, the newspaper reporter Hutchinson Hatch.
As a journalist, Futrelle first worked for the Atlanta Journal, then for the Boston Post. He returned to his first employer and worked for the for the sport section of the Atlanta Journal, a section which he had created. At the same time, he also wrote for the New York Herald.
In 1895 he married Lily May Peel who was also a writer and with whom he would have two children, Virginia and John Jr (who later called himself Jacques.) The family first lived in Scituate, Massachusetts (where he had a house built, called ‘Stepping Stones’ which overlooked the harbour). Although the family frequenltly moved, Futrelle kept ‘Stepping Stones’ where he spent most of his time until his death. Futrelle, who was always interested in science and technology, was the first person to own a automobile in Scituate.
In 1902, he became the manager of a small Richmond theater. He wrote several plays and even acted in a few of them. At the same time, he started writing detective short stories. He achieved fame when, moving to Boston, he worked for the local press, specifically the Boston American owned by William Randolph Hearst. Augustus SFX Van Dusen, aka ‘The Thinking Machine’, first appeared in 1905 in the Boston American with his first short story ‘The Problem of Cell 13’, a forerunner of the closed room mystery genre, in which the hero/ detective proved it was not impossible to escape a prison cell, just by using pure logic. This story was featured in crime writer H.R. F. Keating’s list of the best 100 crime and mystery stories and it was also selected by science fiction writer Harlan Ellison for Lawrence Block’s Master’s Choice.
‘The Problem of Cell 13’ was adapted for television several times, among which was a 1962 adaptation by Arthur A. Ross for the US series Kraft Mystery Theater with Claude Dauphin as The Thinking Machine (which was awarded the 1963 Edgar Award for Best Episode in a TV series.) ‘Cell 13’ was also adapted again as an episode of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in 1973, with Douglas Wilmer as Van Dusen. (The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes also featured an adaptation, still with Douglas Wilmer, of ‘The Superfluous Finger’.)
In 1906, Jacques Futrelle decided to give up journalism altogether to concentrate on writing novels full-time (such as The Chase of the Golden Plate in which ‘The Thinking Machine’ has a minor role, The Simple Case of Susan, The Diamond Master, Elusive Isabel, The High Hand.)
His ‘Thinking Machine’ stories often concentrate on what was the most recent technology of the time (telegraph, telephone, etc.) In ‘The Problem of the Lost Radium’ which takes place in a laboratory at ‘Yarvard’, a combination of Yale and Harvard, Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen even crosses paths with famous French scientist Marie Curie and helps her solve the mystery of the disappearance of one ounce of radium. Futrelle probably chose Marie Curie because of his own French origins.
Futrelle’s fascination with technology probably accounts for his interest in the RMS Titanic, which he boarded on April 10th, after celebrating with friends in London what was to be his last birthday. The party ended late, but Jacques Futrelle and Lily May managed to reach Southampton on time to board the ship. His wife later regretted the fact that Futrelle never drank to excess since, had he been drunk that night, the couple would never have managed to reach the RMS Titanic in time for boarding.
Jacques Futrelle on the deck of the Titanic
Photographer Francis Browne took a picture of him on the Titanic before leaving the ship. This is the last picture of the writer, in front of the Titanic’s sports room. Futrelle and his wife spent their last days together in a first-class cabin, cabin C-123.
When the ship hit the iceberg, Futrelle refused to board a lifeboat and handed the rest of his writings to his wife, who escaped safely on board lifeboat 9. The last time she saw her husband, he was smoking with John Jacob Astor. Lily May was then rescued, along with others, by RMS Carpathia. Futrelle’s mother was so shocked by his death that she is supposed to have died of grief (she died three months after him.)
Futrelle’s last novels, My Lady’s Garter (in which his wife inscribed ‘To the heroes of the Titanic, I dedicate my husband’s book’) and Blind Man’s Bluff were published posthumously (in 1912 and 1914). L. May expanded The Simple Case of Susan (1908) into Lieutenant What’s-His-Name (1915) and The Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine published some uncollected stories in 1949 and 1950. Lily May Futrelle died in 1967, aged 91, and was buried in Sciutate. Their daughter Virginia died in 1981 and their son Jacques, after a career as an editorialist for the Washington Post, in 1979.
Had he lived, Futrelle, who was only 37 at the time of his death, would probably have become one of the major mystery writers of the Golden Age of crime fiction in the US. Max Allan Collins acknowledged Futrelle’s influence and made him the leading character in his The Titanic Murders (1999), a novel about murders taking place aboard the Titanic. Many of his stories are available on Project Gutenberg and futrelle.com. Some stories are available as printed editions. Between 1978 and 1999, a German radio station (RIAS) produced and broadcasted seventy-nine radio plays using the character of Professor Van Dusen.
By Delphine Cingal
The Venetian Vase 
