An unusual rival for Sherlock Holmes...
This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of October 12th 2012.
At a masquerade ball in an unnamed American metropolis at the
start of the twentieth century a daring robbery is committed. “Eleven plates of
the gold service, valued roughly at $15,000” are stolen by a man who, attired
audaciously as the popular image of a robber (“a black mask was drawn down to
his lips, a slouch hat shaded his eyes, and a kit of the tools of his
profession swung from one shoulder”), is last seen speeding away in an
automobile with a beautiful female accomplice in the passenger seat. Naturally,
the raid attracts attention – first from the victim, the millionaire Stuyvesant
Randolph, whose reaction, despite having witnessed that impudent getaway, is
not quite what might be expected, then from the journalist Hutchinson Hatch, “a
long, lean, hungry-looking man with an insatiable appetite for facts”, and,
finally, from that celebrated detective, Professor Augustus S F X Van Dusen, better
known to allies and opponents alike as “The Thinking Machine”.
Created by
Jacques Futrelle, Professor Van Dusen first appeared in a short story in 1905. The Chase of the Golden Plate – the
opening chapters of which are summarised above – was published the following
year and marks the character’s debut in an adventure of novel length. “The
Thinking Machine” was among a wave of imitators – which included Sexton Blake, R
Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke and E W Hornung’s A J Raffles – who followed in
the wake of the success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. It is unsurprising,
then, that Van Dusen should often strike a distinctly Holmesian pose: “The
Thinking Machine receded still further into his chair and stared dreamily
upward with his long, slender fingers pressed tip to tip.” His chief physical characteristics,
however, perhaps to differentiate him from the Baker Street man, are more
difficult to visualise: “bushy, yellow hair straggled down about his ears and
partially framed a clean-shaven, wizened face in which were combined the
paradoxical qualities of extreme aggressiveness and childish petulance. The
mouth drooped a little at the corners, being otherwise a straight line; the
eyes were mere slits of blue, squinting eternally through thick spectacles. His
brow rose straight up, domelike, majestic even, and added a whimsical grotesqueness
to his appearance.”
While it
lacks altogether that strange, subcutaneous darkness which underpins Doyle’s
best work, The Chase of the Golden Plate is
mostly charming and inventive. The novel’s most enjoyable feature is the arresting
modernity of its humour. A policeman speaks in “a
walk-right-up-ladies-and-gentlemen sort of voice”, a butler calls Van Dusen “a
shrivelled little man with a big yellow head” and the love interest of the
piece is described as possessing a “deliciously rounded chin, slightly parted
rose-red lips, and sparkling, eager eyes as blue as – as blue as – well, they
were blue eyes.”
There seems
to be no especially pressing reason for Hesperus Press to have shepherded this curiosity
back into print save that its reappearance in an attractive new edition coincides
with a sombre centenary. Jacques Futrelle died at the age of thirty-seven upon
the RMS Titanic where he was last
seen smoking with John Jacob Astor, the richest man on board. Lily, the
novelist’s wife, made it to a lifeboat and went on to complete several of her
husband’s manuscripts and to dedicate one of them to “the heroes of the
Titanic”. The last photograph of Futrelle may be discovered online and an oddly
haunting thing it is. Taken on deck, Futrelle beams pudgily towards the camera,
hands stuffed into pockets, his head filled with new adventures for his
improbable sleuth, wholly oblivious of the tragedy which, in only a few hours
time, will overtake and consume him.
