Not available in the United States
** Not available in the European Union
***Out of print.
OTHER COLLECTIONS YOU MAY ENJOY
The Great Book of Wonder, by Lord Dunsany (it should have been called “The Lord Dunsany Megapack”)
The Wildside Book of Fantasy
The Wildside Book of Science Fiction
Yondering: The First Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
To the Stars—And Beyond! The Second Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Once Upon a Future: The Third Borgo Press Book of Science Fiction Stories
Whodunit?—The First Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
More Whodunits—The Second Borgo Press Book of Crime and Mystery Stories
X is for Xmas: Christmas Mysteries
ABOUT ARTHUR B. REEVE AND HIS CRAIG KENNEDY STORIES
Arthur Benjamin Reeve (October 15, 1880 – August 9, 1936) was an American mystery writer. He is best known for creating the series character Professor Craig Kennedy, sometimes called “The American Sherlock Holmes,” and his Dr Watson-like sidekick Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter, in eighteen detective novels. The bulk of Reeve’s fame is based on the 82 Craig Kennedy stories, published in Cosmopolitan magazine between 1910 and 1918. These were collected in book form; with the third collection, the short stories were stitched together into pseudo-novels. The 12-volume Craig Kennedy Stories came out in 1918; it reissued Reeve’s books-to-date as a matched set.
Starting with The Exploits of Elaine (1914), Reeve began authoring screenplays. His film career reached its peak in 1919-20, when his name appeared on seven films, most of them serials, three of them starring Harry Houdini. After that—probably because of the migration to Hollywood of the film industry, and Reeve’s desire to remain in the east—Reeve worked more sporadically in film. His career is marked by fiction originally published in newspapers, and a variety of magazines including Country Gentleman, Boys’ Life, and Everybody’s. Eventually, he was found only in pulps like Detective Story Magazine and Detective Fiction Weekly. In 1927, Reeve entered into a contract (with John S. Lopez) to write a series of film scenarios for notorious millionaire-murderer, Harry K. Thaw, on the subject of fake spiritualists. The deal resulted in a lawsuit when Thaw refused to pay. In late 1928, Reeve declared bankruptcy.
In the 1930s, Reeve rejuvenated his career by becoming an anti-rackets crusader. He had a national radio show from July 1930 to March 1931; he published a history of the rackets titled The Golden Age of Crime; and the focus of his Craig Kennedy stories completed the transition from “scientific detective” work to a racket-busting milieu.
During his career, Reeve covered many celebrated crime cases for various newspapers, including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, and the trial of Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann.
He graduated from Princeton and attended New York Law School. He worked as an editor and journalist before Craig Kennedy propelled him to national fame in 1911. Raised in Brooklyn, he lived most of his professional life at various addresses near the Long Island Sound. In 1932, he moved to Trenton to be nearer his alma mater, Princeton.
THE SILENT BULLET, by Arthur B. Reeve
A Craig Kennedy Story
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. Today 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
