The Achievements of Luther Trant

The Achievements of Luther Trant by Edwin Balmer

Luther Trant, a university psychology assistant, grows convinced that scientific instruments can expose truth and guilt more reliably than the "third degree" methods used by police and courts. When Dr. James Lawrie, the university treasurer, is found dead of gas asphyxiation in his locked office with burned promissory notes scattered about, evidence points to suicide following embezzlement. Trant, however, notices the body was laid on a couch rather than having lain down naturally, and deduces Lawrie was murdered before the scene was staged. Using a chronoscope to measure word-association response times, Trant tests Lawrie's daughter Margaret and the dead man's three closest associates—Dr. Reiland, President Joslyn, and trustee Branower. The test clears Margaret and Reiland but exposes Branower's guilty hesitations. Branower confesses that his wife's brother, Harrison, had embezzled funds; when Lawrie refused to falsify records any longer, Lawrie's weak heart failed during their confrontation, and Branower staged the death as suicide to protect his wife's secret. Trant then takes leave to investigate the unsolved murder of prosecuting attorney Bronson, for which police have arrested sixteen gambling-ring suspects, including Jake Kanlan. Using a galvanometer to measure skin conductivity under stress, Trant tests Kanlan and finds his reactions to crime-scene evidence were contaminated by Captain Crowley's earlier browbeating interrogations, proving nothing. Instead, Trant identifies telling gaps: Bronson's watch, though normally accurate, was found stopped at a time later than the murder actually occurred, and a false newspaper report claimed an old enemy of Bronson's had escaped prison the day of the murder. Testing suspect Caylis with the same objects—including a newspaper report and the smell of banana oil from the electroplating shop where the killer waited—Trant provokes uncontrollable reactions proving Caylis's guilt. Caylis had murdered Bronson after being lured out by a false emergency call arranged by Mrs. Mitchell, his estranged wife and Bronson's landlady, who resented Bronson's kindness to her and acted from jealousy. Next, textile magnate Walter Eldredge summons Trant when his young son Edward disappears during an outing with his second wife, Isabel, a former stenographer resented by Eldredge's first mother-in-law, Mrs. Murray, and her son Raymond. Witness testimony seems to condemn Isabel, but Trant recognizes that a spinster witness's account reflects extreme suggestibility while Isabel's contradictory details (colors, timing, the size of the abductor) are consistent with hysteria-induced perceptual distortion, actually corroborating her innocence and implicating Mrs. Murray. Using an automatograph to detect involuntary hand movements toward photographs of a hiding location, Trant confirms Mrs. Murray had the boy concealed to discredit Isabel; the child had actually been taken by mistake by a kindergarten teacher and was safe with a family servant the whole time. Finally, banker Harry Howell consults Trant after his elderly cashier, Gordon, reports mysterious harassment and fears a bank robbery. Gordon's son had earlier been dismissed for allegedly stealing $10,000 in bank funds. Trant deduces that Gordon, whose memory is failing, has been secretly writing the safe's combination in a cipher based on his old typewriter's keyboard symbols, and that a clerk named Ford has been trying to steal fragments of this cipher to open the safe himself in league with young Gordon, who wants to reclaim what he believes was wrongfully taken from his father. Using memory and attention tests, Trant proves Gordon can no longer reliably perform tasks like counting money accurately, and through a word-association test on the bank's clerks, exposes both Ford's scheme and the truth that another clerk, Shaffer, had opportunistically found and kept the original missing bills from a wastebasket, clearing young Gordon's name entirely. Trant is then summoned to New York by Rentland, a Treasury undercover agent investigating suspected customs fraud at the American Commodities Company, whose president, Welter, is suspected of orchestrating smuggling that has already resulted in the death of one dock checker and the disappearance of another. Trant learns of a mysterious bent-wire implement connected to the scheme and arranges to test Welter using a plethysmograph and pneumograph at a psychology demonstration, where Welter's involuntary physiological reactions to a coded reference and to the wire begin to betray his guilty knowledge just as he is confronted.

By Edwin Balmer · First published 1910 · Genre: Detective Fiction, Mystery, Psychological Thriller · 9 chapters · 115,823 words

First lines

"Amazing, Trant."

"More than merely amazing! Face the fact, Dr. Reiland, and it is astounding, incredible, disgraceful, that after five thousand years of civilization, our police and court procedures recognize no higher knowledge of men than the first Pharaoh put into practice in Egypt before the pyramids!"

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detective fiction · psychological mystery · murder investigation · scientific detection · forensic science · word association · crime mystery · psychologist protagonist · university setting · locked room mystery · staged suicide · embezzlement

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