Jacques Futrelle was lost to tragedy, but his captivating works live on.
When the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic on April 12, 1912, the luxury liner took with it one of the greatest early US detective writers—Jacques Futrelle. Futrelle had just turned 37 when he ordered his wife May to take her place on one of the lifeboats putting out from the stricken ocean liner. He assured her that he would survive. The last May saw of her husband, he was standing next to Jacob Astor, smoking a cigarette. His body was never recovered.
"Jacques is dead, but he died like a hero, that I know," May would tell the New York Times a few weeks later. A gifted writer herself, May would complete Futrelle’s novel My Lady’s Garter and publish it with a moving dedication to her late husband. It marked the sad, sudden end of what might have been one of the brightest careers in American crime fiction.
Born in Pike County, Georgia in 1875, Jacques Futrelle began working as a reporter on the Atlanta Journal when still a teenager. He married May Peel in 1895. After spells as a war correspondent in Cuba for the New York Herald and as a theatre manager in Richmond, Virginia, Jacques, May, and their two children settled in Scituate, Massachusetts. Futrelle began writing short stories for the Boston American.
Futrelle had been an admirer of Sherlock Holmes from the master consulting detective’s debut in A Study in Scarlet. He decided to create an American Holmes in the form of Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., etc, etc. This brilliant scientist is also known as The Thinking Machine, a nickname given to him by a Russian chess grandmaster he defeated despite having only learned how to play the game a few hours before the contest.
In a neat tribute to Holmes’ celebrated observation, “There is a scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life”, Futrelle titled one of Van Dusen’s earliest cases—the investigation of homicide in a New York apartment block—The Scarlet Thread.
Van Dusen made his first appearance in the Boston American in the late Fall of 1905. The tale, serialized over six weeks, would become one of the most celebrated fictional crime stories of all time, The Problem of Cell 13. In it, the brilliant scientist vindicates his pronouncement that “Nothing is impossible! The human mind can do anything,” by breaking out of the maximum-security Chisholm Prison to win a small bet.
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