The Silent Bullet

Arthur B. Reeve

Description

America’s Sherlock Holmes makes histhrilling debutin this classic volume of mind-boggling mysteries

Craig Kennedy is a Columbia University chemistry professor by day and New York’s premier sleuth by night. With the help of his roommate and partner in detection, newspaper reporter Walter Jameson, Kennedy uses his mastery of technology to solve the most puzzling of mysteries. In “The Deadly Tube,” he investigates a case of murder by X-ray, and in “The Terror in the Air,” he applies the scientific method to a rash of airplane accidents blamed on gyroscopes.
 
First appearing in the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, Craig Kennedy was one of the most popular detectives of the early twentieth century, and Arthur B. Reeve’s stories featuring the scientific sleuth were the first mysteries by an American author to gain wide readership in Great Britain.
 
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: 9781480442887
• Langue: English

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The Silent Bullet
Arthur B. Reeve

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.


CRAIG KENNEDY’S THEORIES
“IT HAS ALWAYS SEEMED strange to me that no one has ever endowed a professorship in criminal science in any of our large universities.”
Craig Kennedy laid down his evening paper and filled his pipe with my tobacco. In college we had roomed together, had shared everything, even poverty, and now that Craig was a professor of chemistry and I was on the staff of the Star, we had continued the arrangement. Prosperity found us in a rather neat bachelor apartment on the Heights, not far from the University.
“Why should there be a chair in criminal science?” I remarked argumentatively, settling back in my chair. “I’ve done my turn at police headquarters reporting, and I can tell you, Craig, it’s no place for a college professor. Crime is just crime. And as for dealing with it, the good detective is born and bred to it. College professors for the sociology of the thing, yes; for the detection of it, give me a Byrnes.”
“On the contrary,” replied Kennedy, his clean-cut features betraying an earnestness which I knew indicated that he was leading up to something important, “there is a distinct place for science in the detection of crime. On the Continent they are far in advance of us in that respect. We are mere children beside a dozen crime-specialists in Paris, whom I could name.”
“Yes, but where does the college professor come in?” I asked, rather doubtfully.
“You must remember, Walter,” he pursued, warming up to his subject, “that it’s only within the last ten years or so that we have had the really practical college professor who could do it. The silk-stockinged variety is out of date now. To-day it is the college professor who is the third arbitrator in labour disputes, who reforms our currency, who heads our tariff commissions, and conserves our farms and forests. We have professors of everything—why not professors of crime?”
Still, as I shook my head dubiously, he hurried on to clinch his point. “Colleges have gone a long way from the old ideal of pure culture. They have got down to solving the hard facts of life—pretty nearly all, except one. They still treat crime in the old way, study its statistics and pore over its causes and the theories of how it can be prevented. But as for running the criminal himself down, scientifically, relentlessly—bah! we haven’t made an inch of progress since the hammer and tongs method of your Byrnes.”
“Doubtless you will write a thesis on this most interesting subject,” I suggested, “and let it go at that.”
“No, I am serious,” he replied, determined for some reason or other to make a convert of me. “I mean exactly what I say. I am going to apply science to the detection of crime, the same sort of methods by which you trace out the presence of a chemical, or run an unknown germ to earth. And before I have gone far, I am going to enlist Walter Jameson as an aide. I think I shall need you in my business.”
“How do I come in?”
“Well, for one thing, you will get a scoop, a beat,—whatever you call it in that newspaper jargon of yours.”
I smiled in a skeptical way, such as newspapermen are wont to affect toward a thing until it is done—after which we make a wild scramble to exploit it.
Nothing more on the subject passed between us for several days.


I. The Silent Bullet
“DETECTIVES IN FICTION NEARLY always make a great mistake,” said Kennedy one evening after our first conversation on crime and science. “They almost invariably antagonize the regular detective force. Now in real life that’s impossible—it’s fatal.”
“Yes,” I agreed, looking up from reading an account of the failure of a large Wall Street brokerage house, Kerr Parker & Co., and the peculiar suicide of Kerr Parker. “Yes, it’s impossible, just as it is impossible for the regular detectives to antagonize the newspapers. Scotland Yard found that out in the Crippen case.”
“My idea of the thing, Jameson,” continued Kennedy, “is that the professor of criminal science ought to work with, not against, the regular detectives. They’re all right. They’re indispensable, of course. Half the secret of succ