Elusive Isabel
by Jacques Futrelle
"She arrived in Washington two weeks and two days ago from New York, off the Lusitania…". Ironic that Futrelle should pen those words. He perished himself aboard another ill-fated vessel: The Titanic. An able craftsman from the late gaslight period, one can only wonder what he would have gone on to accomplish. Detective fiction fans might know him for writing the "Thinking Machine" stories.
I might not have picked up this title if it weren't for his byline. His story, published in 1908, was posthumously made into film in 1916. A reviewer for Variety (the film made "Variety's Complete Science Fiction Reviews") at the time wrote "The picture is just about a third-rate feature". The sci fi elements are weak but at least there are two:
- like today's atomic war fiction, the threat of a World War was a highly speculated subject at the time in both literature and film. This particular tale supposed a plot to unite Central and South America, France, Spain, Germany and Japan against English speaking nations.
- there's an inventor. His invention is described as: "...to a certain number of vibrations and half-vibrations; a wireless instrument of power, with a modifying addition which the inventor had added, has only to be set in motion to discharge it at any distance up to twenty-file miles". Naturally, in the backdrop of the times, this must stay out of the hands of the enemy.
This is actually more of a spy story than anything.
SPOILERS
In the end, "Isabel" a.k.a. Senora Cassavant a.k.a. Mademoiselle d'Aubinon a.k.a. Miss Jane Kellogg a.k.a. Isabel Thorne deserts her war-mongering homeland and falls for her opponent Secret Service Agent Grimm.
Elusive Isabel - another elusive film title for which we now only have the novel upon which it was based.
written: 11/8/2002
