Review: A Glimpse into the Past
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 26, 2012
These stories were written around the turn of the last century.  They provide some insight into how things were back then, day to day life.  People would buy gasolene (sic) in cans at a store for their "gasolene autos"  (to differentiate from motor cars). It cost 25 cents a gallon. (Say, isn't that  about what it cost in the 1950s, a half century later?)  Women wore driving masks as well as veils to protect their faces while motoring on.  A powerful high speed car would have a (gasp) 40 HP engine.  Electric lights as well as gas jets were in use, sometimes in the same rooms. Finger printing and ballistics were unknown sciences. (But, Professor Van Dusen did know that all murderers had a certain indentation in their heads.) There were many other glimpses of life in those days that I found intriguing.Reader's expectations must have been different back then, but I am sure different from daily reality.  Women as well as men were forever fainting in the stories in  a stressful or shocking situation.  It would appear that suicide by stabbing oneself to death did not seem odd to readers at that time. (In one episode a victim had been stabbed twice in the back and once in the front and the investigators were contemplating whether it could be suicide.) When a murderer was found out, the hitherto and normal acting person would often fall to the ground, raving and foaming at the mouth to be carted off to an insane asylum and locked in a padded cell. (After all, only insane people would commit murder.)Most of the stories involved a mystery, whether murder, robbery, kidnapping, or just escaping from a jail cell, that had me wondering how in the world the problem could be solved.  Needless to say, Professor Van Dusen (The Thinking Machine) came through using pure logic.  Many times the "logic" would appear to me to be pure conjecture but the stories were fun to read.