FICTION ANTICIPATING FACT.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1557, 28 September 1912, Page 9

FICTION ANTICIPATING FACT.

. Deacon Brodie, of Edinburgh,.is a good historical example of the man who • fives a double life—the case of. Dr.;Jekyll and -"llf." ,! llyde is a little qutside'hiistbry— but, a corft!spondent , 'b?ttliel i.''Stfiiaard"' tolcjgraphs news of what seems to be a capital modern instance.. A professor of applied electricity at a technical school...in Chicago lias confessed to a series of robberies; and 'lii.s explanation is that lie committed the various crimes "simply through excitement,' engendered by the voracious reading, of detective • stories." This is'so naif that thel'e may be/some truth in it, though • we Md not supposed professors of science . to., be of tlie'kind to be harmed by "Mr. Horhung or Gaboriau." But truth, as somebody once observed, is stranger- than fiction, and the halfpenny novelette toils behind experience.' The professor is said to have gatli'ered his plunder from the houses of millionaires who were taking their holidays, and he stored it partly in a barn and partly in a room of a safe company. A pretty plausible defence of an insufficient kind :might be that he did it all in fun, for, it. appears that ho. .never sold ' anything,' and ho/could-hardly i have 1 hail .much .use for. ladies' .dresses. or bulky bronze ornaments. '' It would''be;'rather an uninteresting development to prove the man mad, as his family doctor wishes to do, though there might be some interest in the method of madness. The quality of adventure in crime is probably overrated, or at least' the exhilaration to be got'lfrom it. Stevenson made his Deacon Brodie start almost romantically, but' crime became an oppressive'habit with him. The old solicitor in Mr. Granville Barker's "Voysey Inheritance" enjoyed his risks, but his was not a double life; it was an intellectual interest grafted on. to his ordinary work. Mr. Wells has a curate, blamelessly enjoying a holiday at the seaside, who is impelled to enter a., house burglariously just ■ for the sake'of the :it seems that fiction has not done so badly in its attempts to forestall tho Chicago -professor,—but this was. but a. dilettante's misadventure. The curate's explanation that his procedinegs were the experiments of a psychologist did not smooth matters, and'if the American profeskir should attempt a defence on similar lines it would be-an'obvious retort that tho piduancy of his emotions as an amateyr criminal could only be justified by-punishment in the event of detection.—"Manchester; Guardian."