This is a re-post from last year because this guy is inspiring!

It’s the birthday of Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912, #diedtooyoung), lauded for his ingenious mysteries and best known for the oft-anthologized story “The Problem of Cell 13.” Futrelle’s career was unfortunately cut short when he went down with the Titanic, which he did bravely and even heroically.

(Join me in waving your hand if you’re one of those people who would have elbowed your way to the front of the lifeboat line, begging and weeping hysterically the entire time. I’m not afraid to admit it; I’m just afraid to die horribly. Also I hate being cold.)

Futrelle was born in Pike County, Georgia, and started his career at 18 as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal. He married Lily May Peel in 1895, moved to New York City to work as the telegraph editor at The New York Herald, and had two children, a daughter and a son. At this point he started writing detective stories as well.

After covering the Spanish American War, Futrelle was exhausted. He took a break from work, did a brief stint as a theatre manager, and ended up at the Boston American, where he published his stories in serial form and introduced the character Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, considered the “ultimate cerebral detective.” Van Dusen was known as The Thinking Machine. The stories were a success and Futrelle quit the newspaper business altogether and started to write novels.

In 1912, Futrelle and his wife left their children with Futrelle’s parents and went to Europe, where Futrelle did some writing, promoted his work, and visited Scotland Yard for research purposes. They sailed home on the Titanic, and we all know how that went. Futrelle refused a place in a lifeboat and had to force his wife to take her place; she reported that the last time she saw him, he was standing on deck next to John Jacob Astor, smoking a cigarette. (May Futrelle was one of the eyewitnesses who reported that the band played on as the ship sank.) May went on to finish her husband’s last and unfinished novel, Blind Man’s Bluff (1914).

http://www.criminalelement.com/jacques-futrelle-and-the-thinking-machine/

(NB: I see Amazon has a collection entitled Best “Thinking Machine” Detective Stories, 1973, if you want to check out Futrelle’s work.)

Have a fine Thursday in your own quiet, heroic way, be thankful for every heroic essential worker keeping this country going right now, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.