Futrelle, Jaques

American journalist Jaques Futrelle was the creator of the Thinking Machine cases, the most famous of which is "The Problem of Cell 13", republished in 1973 in Best Thinking Machine Cases.  In that story, the Thinking Machine, AKA Professor Augustus S. F. X. van Dusen, a scientist with a string of letters signifying professional degrees after his already impressive name, undertakes to escape from a prison cell by thinking himself out.  Of a slight physical build and an irascible temperament, the Thinking Machine is notable for his irritation with the use of the word "impossible", which leads him to take the bet.  

These stories, and additional one republished in 1976 in Great Cases of the Thinking Machine, were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the author, Jaques Futrelle, died aboard the Titanic in 1912.   Unlike Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Thorndyke, Professor van Dusen makes full use of the technology of the day, especially the telephone, although most of the leg work in the cases is done by reporter Henry Hatch.   I'd have to give "The Problem of Cell 13" an A, but most of the rest of the stories get a grade of B.  I did get rather tired of van Dusen's often repeated dictum of "two and two always make four, not some of the time, but ALL of the time."  

Watson

Note:  This page will be updated from time to time to include more examples of the Watson convention.  

A "Watson" in mystery fiction is the detective's sidekick and first person narrator of events, so called after Dr. John H. Watson, the chronicler of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.  The Watson is usually presumed to be a bit dimwitted and bumbling, mainly to show off the superlative abilities of the detective himself.  In fact, Father Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction rule that says that the Watson must be slightly less intelligent than the average reader.  

I've always felt that dictum to be rather unfair to the original Watson of the Holmes stories, which show Dr. Watson to be intelligent and observant, although less so than Holmes himself.  The popular movie series of the 1940s featuring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson may have contributed to the image of Watson as bumbling and not too bright.

Although the first person narration can be helpful to the reader in that the reader sees everything the Watson, and presumably the detective, sees, the narrative form can also subject the reader to any mistaken observations or inferences or opinions expressed by the narrator.  The use of a Watson can be quite annoying at times, as witness Agatha Christie's use of Captain Hastings as the Watson of Hercule Poirot.  Christie introduced both characters in The Mysterious Affair At Styles, published in 1920, but eventually decided to do without him and sent him off to herd cattle in Argentina in Murder On The Links, published in 1923.  She brought Hastings back several more times over the years, but also brilliantly used the Watson convention to bamboozle the reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  

Probably the next most notable use of a Watson can be found in R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke stories; Freeman actually uses several different narrators, but the most usual one is Dr. Jervis, Thorndyke's junior partner, who, like Thorndyke, is both a medical doctor and a lawyer and who assists Thorndyke in most of his cases.  Jervis sees the factual matters Thorndyke sees, but Thorndyke often possesses additional knowledge that Jervis does not have and refuses to disclose any inferences or opinions he has until the end of the case.  For example, in one case Thorndyke notes that the clothing of the murder victim includes the shell of a particular mollusk, but Jervis does not know, and this reader certainly did not know, that the mollusk was on the verge of extinction and therefore only found in two very limited geographic locations in Great Britain, which renders Thorndyke's zeroing in on a particular site as the scene of the murder unnecessarily mysterious.