Stephen Barr - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 4. Whole No. 131, October 1954

Author’s Postscript: The fictional adventure you have just read has its source in the early part of Benjamin Franklin’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY (the Bigelow version). Remember that these events were supposed to have occurred in the America of 1 722, which was a very different fettle of fish from, let us say , 1776, just before the Revolutionary War. The chief problems in 1722 were not with the British; they were with the French and Indians, they were the rivalries among the colonies themselves, and they arose from the ideological struggle between weakening Puritan theocracy (Cotton Mather did not die until 1728) and such “insidious European doctrines ” as rationalism and scientific method. Complete independence from England was utterly inconceivable in 1722. The bonds tying the colonies and England were so close at that time that travel to England, for example, was as common as to the other colonies — and hardly more inconvenient!

Editors’ Postscript: There is no doubt of it: had Benjamin Franklin turned his mind to it, he could have been the forerunner of what we now call a detective — and if he had turned his pen to it, he might have anticipated Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the modem detective story. Benjamin Franklin was no mean inventor, you know!

Copyright, 1938, by Cornell Woolrich; originally titled “IOU — One Life.”

Copyright, 1952, by Hartzell Spence; originally published in Blue Book.