WHILE VIRTUALLY EVERY READER of detective fiction is familiar with Jacques Futrelle’s (1875–1912) brilliant debut, “The Problem of Cell 13,” the central figure, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, better known as The Thinking Machine, appeared in forty-four other stories, some of which are first-rate, and “The Phantom Motor” is one of the best. Most of the early Van Dusen stories involve investigations of “impossible” (a word despised by the professor) crimes, while his later stories generally deal with bizarre, seemingly inexplicable, situations without falling into the former subgenre.
Born in Georgia of French Huguenot ancestry, Futrelle became a newspaperman, first in Richmond, Virginia, then in Boston, where he worked on the Boston American, which published much of his fiction as well as his reportage. He married L. May Peel in 1895. To celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday, the Futrelles left the children home and took a romantic cruise on the infamous maiden voyage of the R.M.S. Titanic. After the ship crashed into an iceberg and began its trip to the bottom of the icy sea, Futrelle forced his wife into one of the lifeboats and helped other women as well, refusing to board himself, dying in the tragedy.
Although his career as a fiction writer was relatively short, he wrote more than sixty stories and several novels popular in their time but forgotten today, including light romances and crime stories, the best of which are The Diamond Master (1909) and My Lady’s Garter (1912), which features The Hawk, a gentleman thief.
“The Phantom Motor” was first published in the Boston American in 1905; it was first collected in book form in The Thinking Machine (New York, Dodd, Mead, 1907).