The Achievements of Luther Trant

In 1909 William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer published the first story about Luther Trant, the first fictional sleuth to use psychoanalysis in his detection, and one of the first to feature a lie-detector test. What Trant (and the authors) mean by “psychology” is one’s physical reaction in telling the truth or a lie, and upon the instruments that can measure that response. Eventually, a great number of machines is either used or referred to in the stories: chronoscope, galvonometer, automatograph, electric psychometer (or “the soul machine”), sphygmograph, plethysmograph, kymograph, pneumograph. Nowadays, we would find psychological interpretation to be less absolute, and the lie-detectors and other machines to be less dependable, than MacHarg and Balmer believed. But the stories are more than just the application of gadgets. Trant often makes subtle deductions from physical evidence before he employs the machines. The backgrounds of the stories are varied and colorful – Aztec magic, exotic ports, shipwreck, Russian radicals, the deep woods, mixed marriage. The Achievements of Luther Trant was published as a book in 1910 after the first nine stories had appeared in Hampton’s magazine. It included a few of the original illustrations by William Oberhardt; his later fame as a portraitist was already evident in many of the finely wrought illustrations for the Trant stories.