“The Problem of Cell 13” features  Jacques Futrelle’s most famous character Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, known as The Thinking Machine and sometimes called the American Sherlock Holmes. While in a scientific debate with Dr. Charles Ransome and Alfred Fielding, Van Dusen insists that nothing is impossible when the human mind is properly applied. To prove this, he agrees that he will take part in an experiment in which he will be incarcerated in a prison for one week and given the challenge of escaping.

My attention was drawn to this story when I saw this banner in CrimeReads

I’d never heard of Jacques Futrelle so I looked him up and was surprised to find that he was an American (I’d assumed he was French) journalist and mystery writer who was best known for writing short detective stories featuring Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, also known as “The Thinking Machine” for rigorous use of logic to solve problems. 

I found an ebook collection with forty-seven tales of ‘The Thinking Machine’ and settled down to read the most famous one, ‘The Problem Of Cell13’ where Van Dusen is locked up in a death row cell from which he promises he will escape within a week.

The first thing that I noticed about the story was how different the tone was from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Yes, Holmes and Van Dusen are both eccentric but it’s clear that Futrelle sees Van Dusen as a figure of fun rather than as a talented man with some darker passions.

The tone of the storytelling is light and humorous. Van Dusen is described as a pale, physically weak man with a high forehead and a big head who wears a size 8 (64cms) hat. We are told that:

“First and above all he was a logician. At least thirty-five years of the half-century or so of his existence had been devoted exclusively to proving that two and two always equal four, except in unusual cases, where they equal three or five, as the case may be.”

We’re also shown that he comes across as an arrogant and argumentative who accepts no limits on what a can be achieved when a thinking man applies his brain. When one of his guests asks him whether he thinks making airships will be impossible, he replies

“That’s not impossible at all,” asserted The Thinking Machine. “It will be invented some time. I’d do it myself, but I’m busy.”

His combative attitude results in an angry debate with his guests about his assertion that anything is possible, which leads to him accepting the challenge to escape from death row in the local prison.

What follows is a piece of comedy which, after having demonstrated how impossible it would be for Van Dusen to escape, centres on the increasingly frantic efforts of the prison governor to discover and thwart Van Dusen’s efforts to escape.

Van Dusen is a hard man to like. Personally, I was rather hoping that he wouldn’t escape but then there would have been no story.

The story ends with Van Dusen’s explanations of what he had done and how he had made his escape.

I didn’t believe a word of it.

Even so, I found the story to be an amusing distraction, Van Dusen to be a good figure to hiss at, and the humour to be almost of a Keystone Cops standard.

I may dip into a few more Van Dusen stories out of curiosity but I don’t see him as a rival to Sherlock Holmes.