The Master’s thesis that I am working on now for my American Studies program at Kennesaw State University has to do with a little-known American author by the name of Jacques Futrelle. He is more well-known due to the fact that he died in the sinking of the Titanic in April of 1912. The thesis focuses on the masculinity in Futrelle’s writing and how it paralleled the time period and ultimately what would happen to Futrelle in 1912.
Futrelle was born in Georgia and was a newspaper editor for many years before he decided to do free-lance writing. He wrote his most well-known story in 1905 called The Problem of Cell 13, introducing his most famous character Professor Augustus Van Dusen, also known as the Thinking Machine. Van Dusen was the American equivalent to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Futrelle wrote over 50 stories involving the characters as well as a couple of novels. I always wondered why the Thinking Machine didn’t stand the test of time, like Holmes. Everyone has heard the name Sherlock Holmes but not everyone has heard of the Thinking Machine.
I feel maybe it is because Doyle had written a good bulk of Holmes stories by the time that the Titanic sank. Doyle wrote his first Holmes story A Study in Scarlet in 1887. By the mid-1920s, Doyle was still writing Sherlock Holmes stories until his death in 1930. Throughout his tenure of writing the Holmes stories, Doyle had killed off the character in 1893 with a fall, fighting with Professor Moriarty, down the Reichenbach Falls in the story The Final Problem. His fans were so upset that Doyle brought the character back with The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. Then in 1903 Doyle explained that Holmes, in his story, written ten years later called The Adventures of the Empty House, had not really died. He had survived the fall all along. So, we see that Doyle had written the character of Sherlock Holmes over a much wider period with many more stories than Futrelle wrote with the character of The Thinking Machine. After all, Futrelle started writing the Thinking Machine stories in 1905 and he died in 1912, a period of only seven years. His wife May, who was also a writer, published some of her husband’s stories posthumously and did her best to keep his memory and stories alive.
Futrelle put May in a lifeboat when the Titanic was going down, becoming cross with her because she refused to leave him at first. Her last memory of her husband was standing at the railing, smoking a cigarette, and conversing with John Jacob Astor. Futrelle’s body was never recovered from the wreck.
Commentaires