The Ultimate Escape Story

I have just three entries in my shortlist for the ultimate escape story. If you prefer fact to fiction, the real story of how 76 allied prisoners of war managed to escape from a Nazi top security prison camp in Germany in 1944 is tops. Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape (1951) contains real life resourcefulness, team-work and bravery that lead to tragedy. If you lean towards fantasy, you can't beat James Bond's offbeat escape from a cell, deep inside Dr No's lair. In chapters 17 and 18 of Ian Fleming's Dr No (1958), James Bond has to go through an obstacle course set-up along a shoulder wide shaft that terminates with a face-off against a carnivore in a sea pool. But if you want to read a classic short story of sheer ingenuity that narrates like a mystery then this has to be Jacques Futrelle's The Problem of Cell 13 (1905).

Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912) was an American journalist and mystery writer. He worked for a number of newspapers including The Atlanta Journal, the New York Herald, the Boston Post and the Boston American. He resigned from journalism in 1906 to devote himself to writing fiction. He published over seven books and many short stories. He is best known for his character Professor Augustus S.F.X Van Dusen, also known as “The Thinking Machine”. In 1912, after an extended trip to Europe where he made his works known, he returned home aboard the RMS Titanic. Unlike the fantastic escapes in many of his stories he simply perished after forcing his wife to take her seat aboard a lifeboat without him. He is best known for his short story The Problem of Cell 13, which is included in many lists as one of the best mystery stories ever written.

Can Sentence Length Induce Emotion?

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. It begins with a capital letter and ends with a dot which we call a period or full stop. This dot, and most punctuation marks, were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, around 200 BC. It didn't originally indicate the end of a sentence but the place someone who was reading out loud could pause to breathe. Somewhere in elementary school, we were all told that whenever we reach a period, we should take a deep breath, and I think we mostly do!

You might think that nothing could be further from the truth. To begin with, you don't normally read out loud. You can hardly remember who your elementary school teacher was, much less what she had said. And breathing is a necessity of life that usually occurs without much thought. So how can periods possibly control your breathing when you read to yourself? Nonsense right? Dead wrong! The average reader has somehow been trained by experience to take a full breath every time he reaches a period. Try reading a long sentence that has no commas (without thinking about it), and you'll think that you are asthmatic. You'll practically gasp for breath, almost choke. But where as a poor author by improper use of the period may suffocate his reader, a good one can use the period to affect his emotional state!