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‘The name’s Kennedy. Craig Kennedy.’

The twenty-first century crime reader might be forgiven for replying, ‘Who?’ But a hundred years ago, Craig Kennedy, ‘scientific detective’, needed no introduction. He was a household name on both sides of the Atlantic, acquiring the impressive tagline ‘The American Sherlock Holmes’ and conquering newspapers, magazines, books, comic strips, stage, films—silent and spoken—and early television, destined, or so it seemed then, for literary immortality.

Kennedy’s creator, Arthur Benjamin Reeve, was born in the New York town of Patchogue on 15 October 1880. A gifted academic and polymath, he graduated from Brooklyn’s exclusive Boys’ High School in 1899 and went to Princeton University, studying ‘about everything with an ’ology or an ’onomy at the end of it’, inspiring and even tutoring fellow students. Law School beckoned, and although fascinated by the subject of criminal law Reeve had no appetite to compete when he discovered that there were 16,000 lawyers in New York and dropped out to pursue his first love: writing. Various editorial posts led to freelance journalism and some short stories, his first in Argosy magazine, before his big break came with Cosmopolitan in 1910.

Cosmopolitan, the magazine that had premiered H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in the US in 1897, was at that time a monthly literary publication with nearly a million readers. Reeve’s story, ‘The Case of Helen Bond’, introduced Craig Kennedy, ‘the Professor of Criminal Science’, and was followed the next month by ‘The Silent Bullet’ (January 1911), which became the titular chapter of the first hardback when the first dozen stories were collected and published by Dodd, Mead in 1912. The adventures of Craig Kennedy were a constant monthly fixture in Cosmopolitan for two years before becoming less regular items, and more than 80 were published altogether by 1918.

The innovation of Reeve’s stories was that Kennedy, a chemistry professor based in New York, would apply scientific methods to the detection of crime. The fictional narrator was Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter whose bemused interpretation of Kennedy’s wild experiments gave the reader’s eye view of events, recalling Sherlock Holmes’ Dr Watson. The stories contained more than a little science fiction, from developments in chemistry and medicine to speculative communication devices and weaponry, but these were not tales of fantasy: the scientific theories were perceptive and up to date. Reeve prided himself on keeping abreast of the science journals and plundered them for story ideas, with scientists like Tesla and Edison complimenting him on his technological intelligence, and readers thrilled at the possibilities that were envisioned in the Craig Kennedy tales. As John Locke observes in his invaluable biography, From Ghouls to Gangsters: The Career of Arthur B. Reeve (Off-Trail Publications, 2007), the inventions had mysteriously evocative names like the ‘vocaphone’, the ‘sphygmograph’ and the ‘optophone’, but Reeve was not a research scientist or a soothsayer of future-truth and did not restrict himself to hard sciences. He was writing detective stories, and it was his entertaining storytelling and mastery of the puzzle-solution structure that ensured his continuing popularity.

In addition to Cosmopolitan, Reeve wrote stories in the early years for McClure’s, Hearst’s, The Popular, The Red Book, Pearson’s and Adventure magazines, also creating new principal characters—Guy Garrick, an enlightened young detective who had studied criminal science, and Constance Dunlap, a relative rarity in 1913 being a woman detective. There were more books, all bind-ups of the short stories, although they began to be presented as novels, with additional linking material and chapter breaks to disguise the original short story format. The first full-length Craig Kennedy novel, The Gold of the Gods, was published in 1915 by Hearst’s International Library.

It was at this point that the movie industry, a fertile ground for dramatic writers with its requirement for cliffhanger serials, lured Reeve and his fictional brainchild to the silver screen. The Exploits of Elaine (1914), a formulaic follow-on from that year’s The Perils of Pauline, featured Craig Kennedy heroically deploying science against the menace of the villainous Clutching Hand. Two sequels swiftly followed, as did novelisations, which were published by Hearst’s in 1916 and separately in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton. Meanwhile, Craig Kennedy also made his stage debut, with the first play opening in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1915.

Despite a general curtailment in Reeve’s short story output during his film writing years, a new full-length novel commissioned by the respected New York publishing house Harper & Brothers was published in 1917 as part of their centenary year celebrations. The Adventuress, concerning a murder in a munitions firm and the theft of a new invention, the ‘telautomaton’, was serialised initially in the Chicago Examiner for, they claimed, ‘the highest price ever paid this author for a novel’. UK rights were sold to Harpers’ future sister company, William Collins, who also bought the final two collections of Cosmopolitan shorts, The Treasure-Train and The Panama Plot. Meanwhile Harpers went on to publish ten more books with Reeve, plus an impressive twelve-volume reprint collection, The Craig Kennedy Stories (1918), which included the bulk of the Cosmopolitan shorts (although not the newly released The Panama Plot), the novel The Gold of the Gods, the Elaine novelisations and the two non-Kennedy books, Guy Garrick and Constance Dunlap. The widespread success of this set at the time has ensured that the early Craig Kennedy books have remained relatively easy to track down, whereas The Adventuress and the novels that followed it remain generally much harder to find.

With his Cosmopolitan run having ended in 1918, the 1920s saw Reeve diversifying. More film work included writing for stage sensation Harry Houdini, with their first movie, The Master Mystery, also having the distinction of featuring the first on-screen robot, Automaton ‘Q’; he even wrote Westerns. A return to magazines, newspapers and lucrative pulps saw Craig Kennedy appearing in both cosier romantic mysteries and stories set in the country as well as harder-edged gangster stories and syndicated comic strips. Technology remained a constant theme—the film serial Craig Kennedy: Radio Detective (1926) capitalised on a very topical medium, and the novel Pandora (1926) featured synthetic fuel and an atomic bomb.

By the end of the decade Reeve was focusing more on real-life criminology. He became ‘radio detective’ himself when NBC signed him in 1930 to write and host Crime Prevention Program, an advisory series in conjunction with the NYPD. It rejuvenated his journalistic career: more radio followed, he published his first non-fiction book, The Golden Age of Crime, an examination of racketeering and other consequences of Prohibition since its introduction in 1920, and he covered high-profile crime cases in newspapers, including the Lindbergh kidnapping case that had inspired Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

Reeve’s final novel, The Stars Scream Murder (Appleton-Century, 1936), was in terms of the science one of his least plausible—astrology!—and was also Craig Kennedy’s swan song. The flap of the dust-wrapper bore an enthusiastic summary of Reeve’s achievements since creating his scientific detective a quarter of a century earlier:

‘More than a million copies of Arthur B. Reeve’s “Craig Kennedy” books have been sold in the United States to date and almost as many in Great Britain.^fn1 They have been translated into practically every language, including one book into ancient Korean.

‘The Stars Scream Murder, probably the first astrological detective novel ever published, maintains Mr Reeve’s long record of firsts. His first story employed the use of tire treads in detection, a method which has now borne fruit in the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice, with its astounding file of the treads of all tires manufactured. The first story ever to use the now well-known dictagraph was written by Mr Reeve even before the scientific journals had described it. He also wrote the first story based upon the Freudian theory and psychoanalysis. Pioneering in this manner, he has created a new type of detective story with a host of imitators. He himself considers his most important influence the helping along of the creation of a scientific department in every one of the country’s modern detective headquarters.

‘It is hardly necessary to recount the innumerable titles which have made his name a household word as a master of detective fiction, nor to recall his various motion picture serials, such as The Exploits of Elaine, The Master Mystery, Terror Island, etc., which so many of us remember. He was in radio in the days of its infancy, his N.B.C. Crime Prevention Program having achieved particularly wide attention.’

Arthur B. Reeve died just four months later, on 9 August 1936, of cardiac asthma, aged only 55. As John Locke wryly observes, ‘Reeve all but took Kennedy to the grave with him. Most of the books were already out of print; the remainder soon joined the silence. Reeve went from American institution to forgotten man of antiquity virtually overnight.’ The only reprieve was a 26-part television series starring Donald Woods, Craig Kennedy, Criminologist in 1952, although it was pretty generic and largely ignored the science angle that had distinguished the original Craig Kennedy from his peers.

Reeve had undoubtedly struck a chord with readers and had modernised crime fiction to make it feel relevant and exciting; but sadly nothing dates quite as quickly as yesterday’s cutting-edge science. Craig Kennedy now reads more like a parody than a visionary detective. But if you can transport your mind back 100 years, The Adventuress might still ‘unfold new delights to readers of exciting mysteries’, as the review in the London Globe newspaper maintained, and will hopefully inspire readers to investigate more of the forgotten work of Arthur B. Reeve and his ‘American Sherlock Holmes’.

DAVID BRAWN

October 2016