Jacques Futrelle's "The Thinking Machine"

This irascible genius, this diminutive egghead scientist, known to the world as "The Thinking Machine," is no less than the newly rediscovered literary link between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe: Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, who—with only the power of ratiocination—unravels problems of outrageous criminous activity in dazzlingly impossible settings. He can escape from the inescapable death-row "Cell 13." He can fathom why the young woman chopped off her own finger. He can solve the anomaly of the phone that could not speak. These twenty-three Edwardian-era adventures prove (as The Thinking Machine reiterates) that "two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time."