I remember reading this ages ago, probably for school, but I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called. There was a character that claimed to be rather brilliant/resourceful, and made a bet with the warden of a prison(?) that he could escape from any cell he had. He was placed in what was considered to be a very secure cell, down in the basement of the prison. I can’t remember everything he did, except that he discovered field mice were using the drain in the cell to travel in and out of the prison, and he ended up attaching a note (and the promise of money) to one such mouse, knowing it would surely be caught by some kid out there. The note had instructions to seek out a friend of the man, who then apparently helped engineer the escape.
I remember really liking the way it was written and set up. I also remember thinking that I would never forget the name of the story, since I liked it so much. It really sounds like a Sherlock Holmes kind of story, but I haven’t been able to find it since.
I’d love to be able to read it again, and–if it’s by an author I’m not already familiar with–to see what else that author has done.
It was rats, one of three stories with the Professor as the main character. There would have been more, but the author died on the Titanic. I have all three of them in a book somewhere in a box, but unfortunately I can’t remember the names of any of the stories, the writer, or book collection.
The story is “The Problem of Cell 13” by Jacques Futrelle. There were more than three stories about Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. S. F. X. Van Dusen a.k.a “The Thinking Machine”. I seem to remember picking up a collection of the complete stories a few years ago, IIRC with a preface by Harlan Ellison.
Great, by the time I got through Google, everyone else found it. I remember reading that there were only 3 stories starring Van Dusen, but I guess either I remember wrong or the intro to that book was wrong. I am glad to see there are more stories I haven’t read yet. Need to put that book on my wishlist.
Oh, yes, many times we just can’t figure out what the OP is asking for or it’s really just too obscure for us. Other times it takes several dozen posts before we finally understand what the OP is talking about. Unfortunately, very often people are convinced that a book, a short story, a movie, a TV show, a song, or whatever is burned into their memory, but it turns out that they don’t remember it well at all. Sometimes this is because several different books, movies, or whatever have merged in their memory.
Just in case you needed additional evidence of the incredible value this board represents, I recently described this story to a friend as being VERY significant and formative for me as a child, in the same league as Sherlock Holmes, but all I knew was the plot. My first Google search yielded “The Wager” by Chekhov, but my second attempt located this thread from (as I write this) four years ago. Thank you!
Yes. His helper in escaping the prison is a reporter friend of his. After Van Dusen partly sabotages the prison’s lighting system, a work crew shows up to find the problem and fix it. Van Dusen sneaks back out of the prison dressed as one of the crew, then (with his friend) requests an interview with the warden. When the warden grants it, he is surprised to discover that one of the “reporters” is Van Dusen, who changed into civilian clothes once outside the prison.
In hindsight, Van Dusen benefits from a number of lucky (contrived, even) factors that work in his favour, and the prison staff themselves seem conveniently clueless at times. Still a good story, though. I read it in a colllection of three “Thinking Machine” stories, the others of which described a typist who was passing secret messages by hitting the keys in morse code, and a rather Scooby-Doo-ish tale about a fake ghost.
One of the stories, I forget which, described Van Dusen as able to defeat a chess grandmaster (despite Van Dusen’s inexperience with the game) through straightforward application of logic. While the premise is true, it would be about 80 years before an actual computer could do so. I’m guessing Futrelle didn’t really grasp the scope of what he was describing.
