BRAIN WAVES AND DEATH

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940. First edition. Small address label affixed to front paste down, a fine copy in a fine dust jacket with mild shelf wear to corner tips and spine ends. Uncommon in above average condition. (27972). Octavo, pp. [1-10] 1-244 [245-246: blank] [note: first and last leaves are blanks], original decorated green cloth, front and spine panels stamped in dark blue, top edge stained blue, fore-edge untrimmed. A scientist under observation in a sealed room is killed during an experiment in the Howard M. Ward Laboratory where a research team is studying the electroencephalograph. Shortly thereafter a second murder is committed under circumstances as puzzling as the first. The murders are solved by Inspector Noonan, a "practical" Boston detective. BRAIN-WAVES AND DEATH was published posthumously under the pseudonym "Willard Rich" a few weeks after its author, William T. Richards, took his own life. Richards worked for Alfred Lee Loomis and his novel was a thinly veiled account of a real-life laboratory located about 40 miles north of New York City nicknamed "Tuxedo Park." This "secret palace of science" was founded and funded by Loomis, arguably one of the most significant and unaccredited figures in the history of modern military science. Loomis, a world-class tinkerer in his own right, was a visionary who saw that technology would win the looming war-and indeed that an investment in "big science" would be the key to national strength in the future. Loomis went on to establish the MIT Rad Lab and later was instrumental in setting up the Manhattan Project. According to legend, Loomis had all copies of Richards' roman-a-clef bought up and destroyed. Obviously he missed a few copies, but the book is uncommon, especially in jacket. Hubin (1994), p. 678. Adey, Locked Room Murders 958.