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Scientific Sprague

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years ago

Lynde, Francis - Scientific Sprague (1912)

Francis Lynde's Scientific Sprague (collected 1912) is a series of six longish thrillers, set against a railway background in the American West. The short stories differ from Whitechurch's railway mysteries in that Lynde often shows us railroads and tunnels being constructed by crews of engineers and workmen, while Whitechurch confines himself to long established railways in Britain. Lynde's stories deal not just with railway lore, but a whole world of engineering, technical and building detail. This detail is often heavily grounded in science and technology. It relates Lynde's work not just to "railway" fiction, but to the broader world of scientific detection as practiced in England and the United States. Lynde's detective, Calvin Sprague, is in fact of chemist, not a railroad man, sent out West by the US Government to study soil samples. Sprague's vast array of scientific knowledge of all types gives him the ability to penetrate and counteract a wide variety of criminal schemes.

 

The emphasis on public and industrial life in Lynde, and the fighting of villains composed of wealthy, robber baron era plutocratic forces, links Lynde's tales to other American scientific detective writers of the era, such as MacHarg and Balmer. Lynde in fact uses "the man higher up" to refer to such big time corporate crooks, just as MacHarg and Balmer did. Since one does not know the original date of Lynde's stories publication in magazines, it is hard to tell whether Lynde has priority is using this phrase, or MacHarg and Balmer.

 

A limitation of Lynde's work is its simplicity as a mystery. The mystery plot of "The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three" will be easily guessed by most readers. The unfolding "mystery" is so obvious, in fact, that the story seems more like a non-mystery oriented thriller, rather than a true work of mystery and detection.

 

Lynde's characters are largely engineers and railway men. They have a uniform characterization: most are handsome, virile young men, out to build great railways across the vast continent. This can lead to a story in which the twenty main characters all have nearly the same personality and characterization. Tales about such daring young engineers, building great projects in remote locations, were standard in the adventure fiction of the time, often having no mystery elements. Lynde's work, with its rich engineering and railroad detail, and skimpy mystery aspects, can often seem to be essentially part of this non-mystery adventure genre. Lynde's characters have almost no private lives; the romantic intrigues prevalent in most mystery fiction are simply absent here, and the stories tend to have all-male casts.

 

Lynde's emphasis on complex, constructed landscapes can recall the works of Arthur Morrison. The tunnel and surrounding railroad lines in "The Electrocution of Tunnel Number Three" are described in vivid detail. As in Morrison, this landscape is full of technology, and its operation is explained in terms of scientific principles.

 

- Mike Grost

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