The Case of the Glamorous Ghost

Foreword

George Burgess Magrath has exerted a tremendous influence in the field of legal medicine and in the detection of crime.

Dr. Magrath’s life is a splendid example of the manner in which a man’s dynamic personality can spread out over the years, affecting the lives of others long after he is gone.

Many of my readers will remember what I have written about Frances G. Lee, the fabulous character who is mainly responsible for founding the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School; a woman in her seventies who is respected by police officers everywhere, who is an authority in the field of homicide investigation and who has been appointed a captain in the New Hampshire State Police.

The fact that Captain Frances G. Lee became interested in legal medicine was due to the influence of Dr. Magrath. The fact that Captain Frances G. Lee invented her famous nutshell studies in unexplained death has been responsible for training hundreds of competent officers so that they can detect murders which otherwise might go not only undetected but unsuspected.

One of Dr. Magrath’s greatest contributions to investigative science was his devotion to truth.

In every one of his field notebooks he wrote just inside the front cover a quotation from the writings of Dr. Paul Brouardel, the noted French doctor who was one of the first pioneers in legal medicine.

The quotation is as follows:

Dr. Magrath was a colorful personality. There was about him a flair for the dramatic. He was tall and heavy-set with superb shoulders and one of his greatest pleasures was rowing, or, more properly, sculling on the Charles River. He wore his hair long like Paderewski, his dress was informal, usually of soft tweeds, and his tie was invariably a dark Windsor.

There was about his personality something compelling that enabled him to dominate situations without apparently making the slightest effort to do so. He was in spirit a pioneer, blazing a trail in the investigative field, and he had all of the personality of the true pioneer. He was born on October 2nd, 1870. He died December 11th, 1938. During his lifetime he examined over twenty thousand cases of unexplained deaths, and the present highly efficient science of homicide investigation is in large measure due to the trail blazed by Dr. Magrath. The blaze marks on that trail are Truth, Accuracy, Efficiency and Scientific Integrity. Today many feet follow along that trail, and the wayfarers either follow those same blaze marks or become hopelessly lost in the forest of prejudice.

The truly scientific investigator of homicide remains on the one trail that follows those same blazes which Dr. Magrath used for his own guidance.

And so I dedicate this book to the memory of:

GEORGE BURGESS MAGRATH, M.D.

— Erle Stanley Gardner