Here is an unedited sample of the novel, Chapter One.

This post will not remain up, however, but will be taken down after January 15 when the full unedited version of the novel will be available upon request (see the “Buy The Book” page).  Please note that this sample chapter is copyright Jarrod Brown 2010.  Thanks for reading, and please share your reactions in the comment box.

The Philosophy Murders Sample Chapter

As the true philosophers are ever studying death, to them, of all men, death is the least terrible. Look at the matter in this way: how inconsistent of them to have been always enemies of the body, and wanting to have the soul alone, and when this is granted to them, to be trembling and repining; instead of rejoicing at their departing to that place where, when they arrive, they hope to gain that which in life they loved (and this was wisdom), and at the same time to be rid of the company of their enemy.

–Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo

Chapter One

Dr. Bellagio was buried in military uniform.

No one had expected that, and the Twenty-One Gun Salute ringing out in the late summer was jolting not only because of the crack of the rifles but also because none of his students would have thought he would have such an obvious martial display even if his years in Europe had earned it. His students had thought of his short military career as an aside, a distraction from a life of brilliant philosophy and sublime logical investigations. The soldiers, the guns, the flag draped over his coffin—it was nearly as shocking as his death had been.

Bellagio’s story wasn’t so uncommon except for his success, and the path he’d taken was a well tread one. Many intellectuals of his time had volunteered for the war effort. Few, though, had been as young or bright as he had been. As a young man, he had excelled in mathematics and logic, muttering to himself as he scratched through notebooks of equations and derivations. In his office, he kept framed a letter from Bertrand Russell—a response thanking Bellagio for his letter. Bellagio had mailed Russell, already a legend among the living, about an error he had detected in the second edition of Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica that had gone undetected for twelve years. It was dated July 7, 1939. Bellagio would have been 15 years old.

Upon graduating from a New York City high school, Bellagio lied about his age and promptly enlisted and joined the war effort. He spoke both Italian and German flawlessly, his parents being first generation immigrants of those respective nationalities, and by the time he’d enlisted no one could have accused him of not speaking French or reading Latin. While his parentage had perhaps cast some clouds doubt on him, whatever they were they were quickly dissipated by the bright beams of his brilliance and his tireless efforts.

His students appreciated these tales of his brilliance, of a true prodigy. They did not know, however, the just-returned-from-the-war Bellagio, lean and with a voracious appetite for learning, years beyond his professors in almost every way. They did not see the young American in Europe, bent over code, muttering to himself and feverishly working to cryptoanalyze enemy messages, all the while knowing men were dying in the field as they waited for intelligence. They didn’t know that years after he’d left the service that the shadowy world of spies and secret agents kept tabs on him. Nor did they know it was said among those that knew that outside the Room 40 group and a few of his British contemporaries at Benchley Park and Hut 8, there was no better code-breaker in the world.

He had pioneered work in a deductive approach to cryptoanalysis known as frequency analysis. It begins with general to specific deduction with an analysis based on letter frequency of the target language compared to code. So, a major premise might be “That the letter more frequently substituted for in code (in English) is e” and then the minor premise “x is the most frequently appearing letter in the cryptogram” with the conclusion being “x is probably the substitute for e.” While code was far more complex than one-to-one letter mapping, given Bellagio’s abilities in French, German, English and Italian, he was able to work out letter frequency models for mapping all those languages and therefore provide a first mode of analysis based on a priori information that works with any cipher system. More complex codes could be broken down into units and first analyzed using frequency models, sometimes which yielded insights that could be used to reconstruct the encoding method and therefore assist in the next three inductive posterior phases of code-breaking: hypothesis, prediction, and verification.

He’d gone to college on the GI Bill after spending a year at Arlington Hall, the center of American military intelligence, and by his second year he’d already published groundbreaking work in pure math, logic and logical semantics. Soon, he was keeping company with Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein as he served a stint at the Institute of Advanced Studies. By the time he’d completed his Ph.D., something he accomplished in just four year from the time he stepped foot onto a university campus, he was already respected as one of the top mathematical philosophers and logicians in the world, his name spoken of in the same breath as giants like Frege and Russell. His work, however, was in a different strain and challenged some of the best minds in Europe from Peano to Ayers and the remnants of the Vienna Circle in math, logic and philosophy.  One would not find many books in the last half century on any of those subjects that did not make some mention of him.

His students knew nothing, however, of that articulate and verbose wrangler whose capacity for genius and work seemed unlimited. What they saw today instead was guns being fired over a doddering old man, one who had a tendency to forget to comb his thin white hair and who muttered to himself while writing notional with his liver-spotted hands, notation that was far more technical than even his best graduate students could follow. To them, he was more legend than substance, a man with a long list of successfully placed graduate students who were now instructors at top-tier research universities where one was not bothered with the burden of teaching and could focus on what really mattered such as Hegelian aesthetics or a Kantian analysis of the Gulf War. He was a promising old man to write recommendation letters to his pals and publishers. He was certainly not the hollow-cheeked genius, fresh from the killing fields of Europe.

Because he had no family in the area and having never married, his colleagues and students made up the bulk of those present at the burial. There had been no funeral service, only a graveside gathering. The chair of the department, Dr. Aaron Adrent, a fastidious looking man with a nervous grin, gave a short three minute eulogy about what a wonderful man Bellagio had been, and then there was the firing of the salute. And then it was over, people walking back towards their automobiles amid the acrid smell of gunpowder on the last sticky days of an ebbing summer. The newspaper that day contained a note about the professor’s death, unobtrusive on the second page.

 Local University Professor Killed in Home Invasion

Author, philosopher and mathematician, retired Army Corporal Dr. Leo Bellagio, David Epstien Chair of Humanities at State University of Cincinnati, was found dead in his home on Tuesday, victim of an apparent home invasion. It is believed that Bellagio was killed by burglars targeting valuable art items. Family members have reported several valuable paintings missing. Local dealers have been put on alert regarding the missing items. Anyone with information regarding the case should contact Ohio State Police, Detective Tom Siders investigating.