Peter Costello
Father Browne’s Titanic Album: A Passenger’s Photographs and Personal Memoir,
by E. E. O’Donnell, foreword by Dr Robert D. Ballard
(Messenger Publications, €16.99)
Even after the marking of the centenary of its loss, the sinking of the Titanic still holds the imagination of many, and this despite other disasters as great or worse. However as time passes what particularly appeals are the stories of individuals, not so much the rich and famous, but the lesser known casualties.
One image in particular caught my attention here. It is of the American writer Jacques Futrelle (pictured on the deck of Titanic), the creator of the ‘Thinking Machine’, Prof. Augustus Francis Xavier Van Dusen, a solver of mysteries to rival Sherlock Holmes. The professor’s name suggests, of course, a Catholic background, though this is not alluded to in the tales. However, Van Dusen is a logician, dependent on reason, in the true Aquinas tradition. This reminds us that the Christian influence on the detective story in the 20th Century – such names as Chesterton, Fr Ronald Knox, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers spring to mind – is one mystery which literary historians have never fully investigated. Futrelle was a sad loss to the genre, but at least his stories still survive him.
