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Dollar, John. John Dollar was created by E.W. Hornung (A.J. Raffles, Stingaree) and appeared in nine stories in The Red Magazine in 1913 and 1914, beginning with “The Physician Who Healed Himself” (The Red Magazine, Aug. 15, 1913); the stories were collected in The Crime Doctor (1914).
John Dollar is an alienist who is wounded during the Boer War. The wound–a gunshot to the head–alters Dollar, producing “some form of local paralysis” which forces him to steal compulsively. Dollar is eventually caught and cured, which leads him to work on solving, through analysis and in some cases brain surgery, the insanity of crime–for, in his words, “all crime is a form of madness.” Some of the criminals who Dollar cures are pyromaniacs, violent suffragettes, foreign spies, a young ne’er-do-well, and a serial killer.
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