Arthur B. Reeve

The Social Gangster (Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective) Arthur B. Reeve

"The fifth volume in the chronicles of Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective, takes up the familiar and successful formula for a new round of adventures. Kennedy deals with the usual sorts of crimes--jewel theft, missing persons, wrongly accused suspects, fixed horse races, arson, murder, and blackmail--but he uses scientific procedures to analyze the evidence, sometimes involving fantastical devices. In this volume, for example, we have a new form of lie detector, a primitive sound recorder, a device that detects eavesdropping, rays that cause explosives to spontaneously ignite, a perpetual motion machine which is debunked but which conceals a device that dissolves walls, mysterious drugs, and murder by means of germs. There's also a mystery involving voodoo, although there's no supernatural content. For fans of the Sherlock Holmes genre in particular, although SF readers should be entertained by Kennedy's methods." -- Don D'Ammassa, Science Fiction Chronicle