The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes by Mike Ashley (ed)

Author:Mike Ashley (ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: mystery, locked-room, anthology
ISBN: 9780786707904
Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
Published: 2000-10-29T07:00:00+00:00

THE MOTOR BOAT

Jacques Futrelle

One of the many tragedies linked with the sinking of the Titanic was the death of author Jacques Futrelle (1875–1912). Futrelle was the creator of Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, better known as “The Thinking Machine” because of his remarkable grasp of logic and deduction in solving apparently impossible crimes. Van Dusen came to prominence in one of the best known of all locked-room mysteries, “The Problem of Cell 13”, serialised in The Boston American in 1905. Dusen claimed that he could escape from a locked cell in the strongest prison kept under constant watch. The story was run as a contest to see if anyone could come up with the solution. The way in which Futrelle achieves his escape is perhaps the most ingenious in all fiction. I have not selected that story here, partly because it is almost constantly in print in some book or another, but mostly because it is not a crime story, but an extremely clever challenge. After this story Dusen is consulted, usually by newspaper reporter Hutchinson Hatch, on all manner of bizarre and seemingly impossible crimes. The following story, which first appeared in the Sunday Magazine (9 September 1906) is much less well known, though it is wonderfully bizarre.

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