A paranormal mystery

Recently I've become somewhat addicted to mystery fiction from the early part of the 20th century. I started with locked-room mysteries, which were very popular at that time. The first locked-room mystery ever written is the famous Edgar Allen Poe short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue."

One of the most famous of all locked-room mysteries is a unique short story called "The Problem of Cell 13, written by Jacques Futrelle. I say it's unique because it involves no actual crime. Futrelle's protagonist is a wizened scientist whose international reputation as a savant has earned him the popular nickname The Thinking Machine; his actual name is Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S. , etc. In this story, The Thinking Machine simply accepts a bet that he can escape from a locked prison cell within a week using only his wits, or as he would say, using the power of logic.

The story has been anthologized many times and is well worth a read. Futrelle, knowing a good thing when he had it, wrote many more stories featuring Dr. Van Dusen and and his sidekick, intrepid reporter Hutchinson Hatch. They do not quite measure up to Holmes and Watson, but they do make a good team, and many of the stories are quite ingenious. I've been working my way through a more-or-less complete compendium of them. Though remembered only by mystery buffs today, Futrelle still has a following and even an official website.

 

Jacques Futrelle

 

When I got to one of the last stories in the collection, "The Tragedy of the Life Raft," I found something that surprised me and suggested a possible paranormal element – specifically, precognition. The story concerns a miserly usurer haunted by a vision of a life raft at sea. The vision appears three times in the story.

For many minutes Peter Ordway sat with dull, lusterless eyes, gazing through the window into the void of a leaden sky. Slowly, as he looked, the sky became a lashing, mist-covered sea, a titanic chaos of water; and upon its troubled bosom rode a life raft to which three persons were clinging. Now the frail craft was lifted up, up to the dizzy height of a giant wave; now it shot down sickeningly into the hissing trough beyond; again, for minutes it seemed altogether lost in the far-plunging spume. Peter Ordway shuddered and closed his eyes.

... a lashing, mist-covered sea; a titanic chaos of water, and upon its troubled bosom rode a life raft to which three persons were clinging ... [This description is repeated verbatim a little later.]

What struck me about these passages will become immediately obvious when I explain the denouement of Futrelle's life. He and his wife Lily had been traveling abroad and decided to return to America on the maiden voyage of a luxury liner. This was in April, 1912, and the liner was the RMS Titanic. As the ship was going down, Futrelle frantically implored his wife to board a lifeboat and eventually succeeded in making her do so. He himself refused to board one of the boats and gallantly went down with the ship.

You can see why “The Tragedy of the Life Raft” got my attention. As we learn in the unraveling of the mystery:

The tale began with the foundering of the steamship Neptune, Liverpool to Boston, ninety-one passengers and crew, some thirty-two years ago. In mid-ocean she was smashed to bits by a gale, and went down. Of those aboard only nine persons reached shore alive.

So we have an ocean liner that sinks, a life raft (close enough to a lifeboat) carrying a handful of survivors, and to top it all off, the repeated use of the adjective “titanic.” Moreover, a character in the story is obsessed with this memory and keeps returning to it as an almost mystical vision. I wondered if Futrell had actually anticipated his own death, at least on a subconscious level.

It would be interesting to think so. But when I looked into the matter a little further, a more prosaic explanation presented itself. The story was first published in August, 1912, in a publication that called itself, rather immodestly, The Popular Magazine. Note that the Titanic went down in April, 1912, so this publication was posthumous. In fact, the magazine cover announces “the last stories of Jacques Futrelle,” a slight exaggeration, since, as far as I can tell, there is only Futrelle story in the issue.

 

August 1912 issue of The Popular Magazine. Cover art by N.C. Wyeth

 

Bearing all this in mind, we can see what may have happened. It’s entirely possible that an enterprising editor, seeking to remind readers of Futrelle’s tragic and highly newsworthy death, inserted the adjective “titanic” into the narrative, using it three times to call attention to it. “A titanic chaos of water” is not an obvious choice of words, and the adjective may well have been added to the manuscript by another hand.

This would still leave the other elements of the story that presage Futrelle’s death: the sinking of an ocean liner, survivors on a life raft, etc. But without the word “titanic,” the connection is much less obvious. Futrelle wrote a lot of stories – he cranked them out month after month from 1905 to 1912 – and the idea of a ship lost at sea is hardly original.

Overall, then, I’m inclined to think that, like Dr. Van Dusen, I’ve been able to apply logic to solve the problem of Futrelle’s last story. As The Thinking Machine likes to say, "Two and two make four — not sometimes, but all the time."

But I could be wrong. Maybe an editor didn’t add the word “titanic.” Maybe it was in the manuscript from the start. I suppose we’ll never know.

Comments

[Susan L Sorensen]

This post would have made a great "One Step Beyond" episode. It would end with your same last sentences.

[Ian]

While we'll never know if Futrelle foresaw his own death, he might have sensed that he was approaching an exit point: I've read in a few NDE's and channeled material that our life has a few moments where we can decide - subconciously, it seems - if we want to continue living, or if we want to return home. Perhaps Futrelle, his higher self, or whoever, decided that he had accomplished what he wanted to do, and that he would take an early exit.

This post is also of great interest to me: In September of last year, I wrote in the Death Race 2000 blog about how I had a dream where one of my deceased relatives showed up and said that she was looking forward to seeing me on her birthday, which is February 1rst, a date that's fast approaching. And as it draws closer, I find myself getting what feel like nudges to try and get closure on several personal matters, such as furiously finishing up the first draft of a book I've been working on, posting conclusions to online projects, and the like. It could be the result of an overactive imagination - or perhaps just paranoia - but that dream has been weighing rather heavily on me as of late.

Perhaps this presents a rare opportunity: If I'm still alive on the 2nd, I'll post a reply here confirming that I'm still around. If I don't, and I don't post anything within a week... well, you may have a confirmed case of someone who got a hint of their own demise, Michael, and it turned to out to be true.

[Michael Prescott]

I hope (and expect) to hear from you on February 2, Ian!

Maybe she just meant she was coming to visit ...

[Ian]

Well, I'm still here. Guess that means there are three possibilities as to what happened:

1. That dream truly was just a dream conjured by my brain, and nothing more.

2. It really was my relative visiting me, but if I was being told about an exit point, something happened between then and now to change it.

3. She was referring to a February 1rst in the future.

[Michael Prescott]

Thanks for keeping us updated, Ian! Glad you’re still incarnated. 🙂