ABOUT “WHITE OUTCAST”

by John Russell Fearn

As scientific knowledge advances, it is inevitable that the criminal will perfect his own scientific resistance to the probing of the law, but if, as seems the case, scientific justice must finally triumph, it will mean the reduction of crime to a very low percentage, the game simply not being worth the risk.

It is also possible, however, that with the almost total elimination of ordinary crime, there will come criminal activity of a type which will which will baffle even the earth’s best scientific criminologists. Such a story is the present one, where I have imagined the Investigation Department of the future faced with a particularly strange sort of menace, and one which, given time and scientific achievement on this and other worlds, is perhaps not so outlandish as it at first appears,

In most of its main details this story follows out the fast-action tradition of the modern detective story, the one essential difference being the locale and scientific basis for the mystery. That the police of the future will control particular sectors of a city simply by switchboards is not by any means improbable, particularly as radio, television, electric eyes, and so forth evolve to their full possibilities.

Some readers, I suspect, will question the Jekyll and Hyde theory, which the story uses. So what? Strevenson started it off—then Arthur B. Reeves transplanted it into modern setting very effectively. Here it is transplanted into the future but with, I hope, the one virtue that a creature like the Outcast might be logically able to do such things by reason of his planetary upbringing. The idea in itself is not new, I admit, but the uses to which it is put definitely are.

Without giving the yarn away (because you may read this before the story), I am forced to stop right here.