The Mystery Mind

Arthur B. Reeve, John W. Grey

Description

An action-packed tale of the occult featuring a plucky heroine, murderous devil worshippers, and the mind-bending science of hypnotism

A sinister band of killers marks a young heiress for death. The assassins, led by a spectral voice known as the Mystery Mind, seek a treasure from the lost city of Atlantis. Kidnapped by the evildoers, Violet Bronson prays that her guardian, Doctor Sutton, and her fiancé, hypnotist Robert Dupont, will rescue her. Sutton and Dupont set out in search of the Temple of the Skull, but the solution to this paranormal mystery proves even more bizarre than these two men of science could have imagined.
 
A novelization of a popular film serial, The Mystery Mind is spooky, suspenseful, and irresistibly fun.
 
This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Sujets

• Détective
• Classics
• Mystery

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 24 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781480444522
• Langue: English

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The Mystery Mind
Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

ARTHUR B. REEVE
When Sherlock Holmes took the world s readership by storm in the 1890s, authors and publishers alike saw the potential for success with the creation of a series detective. Although a little late to the game, few authors were as popular as Arthur B. Reeve (1880-1936) and his character, the scientific detective Craig Kennedy, who made his debut in The Silent Bullet (1912) and appeared in an additional twenty-three novels and short story collections.
Born in Patchogue, New York, the son of Jeannie (Henderson) and Walter F. Reeve, he graduated from Princeton University in 1903 and went on to study law, which he never practiced, becoming a journalist instead. Reeve grew interested in scientific crime detection when he wrote a series of articles on the subject, and he subsequently created Craig Kennedy, the most popular detective in America for several years. Much of that vast popularity was due to silent film serials, also written by Reeve, about a young heroine named Elaine who constantly finds herself in the clutches of villains, only to be rescued at the last moment by the white-coated Kennedy.
Reeve s stories were the first American mysteries to gain wide readership in Great Britain. They are not read much today, for pseudoscientific methods and devices that were of great interest then are all outdated-and many of them never had a solid technical basis in the first place. Reeve s major achievement was his application of Freudian psychology to detection two decades before psychoanalysis gained substantial public acceptance. During World War I he was asked to help establish a spy and crime detection laboratory in Washington, DC.
Reeve wrote only four mysteries not involving Kennedy: Guy Garrick (1914), Constance Dunlap: Woman Detective (1916; short stories), The Master Mystery (1919; a novel based on a motion picture serial starring Harry Houdini; written with John W. Grey), and The Mystery Mind (1920; a novel based on a motion picture serial about hypnosis; also written with Grey).
CRAIG KENNEDY
One of the first popular scientific detectives in mystery fiction was the American Craig Kennedy, preceded in England by R. Austin Freeman s Dr. John Thorndyke. At the height of his fame, Kennedy was known as the American Sherlock Holmes.
Scientific miracles are commonplace in his cases; for example, such technical marvels as lie detectors, gyroscopes, and a portable seismograph that can differentiate between the footsteps of different individuals were all accurately predicted. Like Holmes, Kennedy is a chemist who uses his knowledge to solve cases. He is also one of the first detectives to use psychoanalytic techniques.
Kennedy is a professor at Columbia University who also works as a consulting detective. A man of action as well as thought, he is a master of disguise and uses a gun when circumstances require it. Inspector Barney O Connor of the New York Police Department frequently asks for unofficial help from Kennedy. Walter Jameson, Kennedy s roommate, is a newspaper reporter who chronicles his adventures and also tries to solve cases on his own, with a predictable lack of success.
Films
Kennedy made his first film appearance in a 1915 Path serial, The Exploits of Elaine . Although Elaine-portrayed by the popular Pearl White-is the nominal central character, it is her friend Kennedy (Arnold Daly) who does battle against the mysterious Clutching Hand. Clutching Hand, seeking Elaine s inheritance, is extraordinarily scientific himself, wielding death rays and creating poison-kiss epidemics; in one episode, Kennedy brings a dead girl back to life with Dr. Leduc s method of resuscitation, a machine he wheels out of a corner of his well-equipped laboratory. There were two sequels featuring both Elaine and Kennedy: The New Exploits of Elaine (1915) and The Romance of Elaine (1916).
Kennedy uses the wireless and x-rays and is shot with phosgene bullets and trapped in a vacuum room in the 1919 fifteen-chapter serial The Carter Case (subtitled The Craig Kennedy Serial ). Herbert Rawlinson played the detective. In 1926, Kennedy (Jack Mower) was a subordinate character in the ten-chapter serial The Radio Detective , coming to the aid of the hero (Jack Daugherty), an inventor and devoted Boy Scout leader whose radio wave discovery is a gangster s target. Kennedy retired for ten years, emerging only when challenged by an old villain.
The Clutching Hand . Stage and Screen, 1936 (fifteen-chapter serial). Jack Mulhall, Marion Shilling, Yakima Canutt, Ruth Mix, Mae Busch, Robert Frazier. Directed by Albert Herman.
The director of a large industrial corporation announces the discovery of synthetic gold and is kidnapped by the unknown Hand. The hooded villain contacts his many (numbered) agents by way of television as he sits before multileveled monitors; the electronic and video tape gimmickry rampant throughout the serial and upon which the solution depends is extraordinarily sophisticated for its day.
Television
In the early days of television Donald Woods starred in Craig Kennedy, Criminologist (1952), a series of twenty-six half-hour programs.


I
PHANTOMS
In her vexation Violet turned in bed, boring with a very blond head into the depths of her pillow. It was unreasonable; wholly unreasonable. Doctor Sutton, her guardian, had insisted that she postpone her wedding until after her eighteenth birthday. That was a difference of only a very few weeks, but it disarranged all her pet plans, it meant that she would have to wait just that much longer, and she loved Robert better than anything else in the world.
A sharp slam of the shutter startled her, scattering rebellious thoughts wide cast. There was no mistaking the metallic sound as the heavy, old-fashioned wooden frame engaged the catch holding it to the side of the house. Yet outside there was not the faintest breath of breeze. No stir of the foliage framing the open square of window reassured her. No movement of the sultry air accounted for the interruption to her very sulky reflections.
She turned again and lay still, fearful, gazing intently at the patch of moonlight patterned by the leaves. A reflected illumination revealed her slim, girlish outline beneath the covering. Her hair, damp as a result of restless tossing about, clung to her forehead in a natural curl. Her eyes were bright, glistening in the semidarkness as she waited. There was a delicate ethereal element in the molding of her features which betrayed a fine-strung sensitiveness, suggested the depth and strength of her imagination.
But the sudden slam had been no creation of fancy. The sharp click of the catch had been too familiar a sound to be mistaken. Alarming her was the fact that she had heard no creaking of the rusty hinges. There had been no natural wide swing of the shutter, accountable, perhaps, without a wind. Rather, it was as though some intruder, some living thing, had lurched against it momentarily in the stillness of the night.
No further sound or movement gave color to her fright. After a while she smiled faintly, remembering the many baseless fears of her childhood, recalling to mind the several occasions on which her terrified screams had alarmed the household, and all to no purpose. From infancy Violet Bronson had been fanciful, eerie, claiming at times to see strange, floating, filmy forms, to hear vague and elusive strains of music. Could this, after all, be some trick of her subconscious mind?
Could her sleeplessness have induced the return of childish illusion?
Resolutely she faced the wall. There the moonlight traced the designs of the wallpaper. In its sheen the tints of the conventional figures were transformed strangely. But there was something restful in the effect, perhaps a hypnotic something in the lunar rays. She felt a drowsiness stealing over her. Her eyes became heavy-lidded. She realized that sleep, at last, was coming. Suddenly, upon the wall before her eyes, there rose the shadow of a man. His face was in profile, and it was the outline of a face such as she had never seen upon any living creature. It was as though his features blended, blurred, faded into nothing. The top and back of the head was distinct, as shadowed by the moon. The nose, the mouth, and the jaw of the intruder were semitransparent. It was a phantom face, a countenance possessing neither substance nor reality.
Terrified, she sought to scream and found the muscles of her throat paralyzed. As quickly as the shadow had risen before her it dropped from view. It seemed to her that some one had clambered through the window, swiftly, silently. Once more she tried to find her voice, then, with mounting courage, she controlled herself. Listening, hearing no sound, she rose in bed. She glanced about the room with distended eyes, seeking to penetrate the darkness. Feverishly her hand groped for the switch of the reading lamp standing by her bed.
At that moment she heard a second sound. As in the case of the shutter, there was no mistaking it. It came from the farther corner of the room, near the door to the hall. It was the noise made by the quick closing of a book. Almost at the same instant her fingers caught the switch, fumbled for a moment, pressed the button which mad