Arthur B. Reeve

• Born: October 15, 1880
• Birthplace: Patchogue, New York
• Died: August 9, 1936
• Place of death: Trenton, New Jersey

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Craig Kennedy, 1910-1936

Contribution

The twenty-six books about scientific detective Craig Kennedy were once among the most popular detective stories by an American writer, with sales of two million copies in the United States alone. Arthur B. Reeve was popular primarily because of his emphasis on the use of the latest scientific devices to solve mysteries. Reeve was not one to waste time on deeply etched characters; he focused instead on an imaginative rendition of a scientific marvel—the Maxim silencer, an oxyacetylene blowtorch, the Dictaphone, the seismograph, liquid rubber to conceal fingerprints—with which the crime was committed or by means of which Kennedy could solve the mystery. The very reason for Reeve’s popularity in the years before World War I, his topicality, dates the stories and makes him a largely forgotten author.

Reeve’s straightforward, journalistic style, combined with a lively imagination and an ability to tell a good story in spite of his cardboard characters, makes the earliest episodes readable and entertaining, despite his scientific marvels having become commonplace. The emphasis on topicality makes them documents for the social scientist rather than the literary critic.

Biography

Arthur Benjamin Reeve was born in Patchogue, New York, on October 15, 1880, the son of Walter Franklin Reeve and Jennie Henderson Reeve. Having been graduated from Princeton University in 1903, he attended New York Law School but never finished, preferring journalism instead.

Reeve became assistant editor of the magazine Public Opinion, contributing articles on science. On January 31, 1906, he married Margaret Allen Wilson of Trenton, New Jersey; they had three children, two sons and a daughter. He continued writing articles on topics such as politics, crime, science, farming, social conditions, and sports. In later years, he became a specialist in growing dahlias.

Reeve’s first Kennedy story was rejected by several magazines before being accepted by the editor of Cosmopolitan, where it appeared in the December, 1910, issue; this publication marked the beginning of a long series of monthly appearances of Kennedy stories in the Hearst magazines.

Fascinated with the technology of the motion picture, Reeve wrote a series of fourteen interconnected stories that became one of the most successful early silent film serials, The Exploits of Elaine (1914). It resulted in two sequels, for a total of thirty-six episodes. Reeve wrote screenplays for several other serials and features, including three starring Harry Houdini.

Although Kennedy was not as popular after the war, Reeve continued to find a market for him in the pulp magazines. In 1926, he published a Kennedy novel entitled Pandora, then turned his typewriter to the service of society with articles on crime prevention and a radio series on the topic in 1930-1931. In 1935, he covered the Lindbergh kidnapping trial for a Philadelphia newspaper.

Encouraged by the renewed interest in his character and a film serial based on his 1934 novel The Clutching Hand, Reeve wrote another Kennedy novel, The Stars Scream Murder (1936). It was Kennedy’s last case. Reeve died in Trenton, New Jersey, of complications brought on by an asthmatic and bronchial condition, on August 9, 1936.

Analysis

Arthur B. Reeve may have borrowed the idea of using a word-association test in “The Scientific Cracksman” (in The Silent Bullet, 1912) from “The Man in the Room” (in The Achievements of Luther Trant, 1910, by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg), but the emphasis differs. Reeve’s success with Craig Kennedy went far beyond anything his predecessors had achieved. Within a few months, Kennedy the scientific detective was a household name, and his creator was hard put to keep up with the demand for his adventures.

In less than a decade, Reeve turned out enough material to make a twelve-volume collected edition of his books not only feasible but a marketable commodity as well. A few decades later, Craig Kennedy would be forgotten, but during the years between 1910 and 1920, he was the best-selling fictional detective in the United States, considered by his publisher (especially for advertising purposes) the American Sherlock Holmes.

The secret of Reeve’s success lay in his timing; his emphasis on the latest scientific discoveries in an age that took pride in progress; and the appearance of the stories in one of the most popular magazines of the day, one part of the publishing empire of William Randolph Hearst. Although Reeve wrote ten novels about Kennedy, it is in the short form that the writer’s skill as a storyteller lies. Although the series spanned two and a half decades in publication, it is the earlier stories that retain the greatest interest—as reflections of a vanished period in American society as well as examples of an earlier mode of detective fiction.

To keep up with the demand for stories about Kennedy, Reeve often reused ideas and even recycled actual episodes that had appeared in earlier stories. Short stories were often expanded to fit a longer format, and stories that had appeared in magazines were often rewritten for book publication with characters altered and situations reversed. Some of this recycling was the result of contractual obligations, but some was simply a matter of expedience. Reeve was a one-man fiction factory with insufficient raw materials.

Reeve may not have described Kennedy’s physical appearance, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind what he looked like. Will Foster’s illustrations made it obvious that the professor of chemistry at an unnamed university (apparently intended to be Columbia) was clean-cut, square jawed, and stocky. Walter Jameson, his reporter friend who narrated the stories, was slight of build with fine features. Beyond that, it was up to the readers to form their own images.

In the early period, a Craig Kennedy story was as ritualistic as any in the Holmes canon. Each story opens in Kennedy’s laboratory in the chemistry building on the campus of the university or in the apartment he shares with Jameson. Enter the client or Inspector Barney O’Connor to present a problem to Kennedy and ask for his help. Kennedy may suggest that the case should be easy to solve simply because it seems so extraordinary. This is quite in keeping with one of Holmes’s own patterns of reasoning.

The crime is usually murder committed in unusual circumstances. A young couple is found dead with no discernible means or motive to be found. There are so few suspects that the focus is not so much on who did it as on how the crime was committed and the motive. The motive is often apparent, since there is only one logical individual who benefits. Each story contains two scientific devices, one used to commit the crime and one to solve the mystery. Kennedy discovers the first through his own wide knowledge of scientific matters, but he creates the second in his laboratory, often concealing its nature and significance until the end of the story.

It was this element, the scientific device, which was responsible for Reeve’s great popularity. Kennedy’s basic theory was that science could be applied to the detection of crime just as it could trace the presence of a chemical or locate a germ. Ballistics, voiceprints, the use of film cameras to record crimes in progress, the identification of the typewriter used by comparing the alignment of the letters, and Dictaphones are only some of the devices that Kennedy uses to combat crime. Yet the novelty wore off, much of it quickly became outdated, and even more novel devices had to be described in subsequent stories. Some of this is sufficiently representative of the period for the stories to have acquired a significance as social history.

If some of the descriptions of the scientific principles and marvels seem vague and insubstantial, verisimilitude is nevertheless established by the offhand references to authorities who have performed similar experiments or published papers on the same topic. Occasionally, Kennedy will read aloud from an account in a newspaper that supports his own thesis. The press’s well-known reputation for objectivity adds the required substance to this hitherto unfamiliar scientific theory.

The series’ decline in quality is easy to follow. Reeve’s popularity was often in inverse ratio to the quality of his writing and his ingenuity. Eventually, his popularity waned, the response of a fickle public that always demanded the new and novel. Reeve was able to ring the changes on his own formula with success only for a decade.

Reeve’s best stories were produced between 1910 and 1918 for Cosmopolitan and Hearst’s International Magazine. Not uniform in quality, they nevertheless convey an inventiveness and an ability to tell a good story, no matter how improbable the premise, producing in the reader that necessary and traditional willing suspension of disbelief.

The decline began even before this era was ended, with the novelizations of the film serials that starred Pearl White. It continued into the novels, which replaced science with psychoanalysis. (Reeve did utilize psychology in the short stories as well, but not to the extent that he did in his novels.) The decline continued in the thematic groups of short stories in the 1920’s, through his stories for a juvenile audience (The Boy Scouts’ Craig Kennedy, 1925; The Radio Detective, 1926), and ended in his attempts to rekindle an interest in his hero shortly before his own death. The ideas and their execution are weak and lack the ingenuity of the early years.

Although Reeve’s first two Kennedy books are clearly collections of short stories, subsequent titles are more subtle about their content. Not only has the original magazine sequence been altered, but also Reeve edited the original texts so that the collection appeared to be a novel in appearance if not in fact. The Dream Doctor (1914) consists of twelve short stories, but they are divided into twenty-four chapters, with the second story beginning a few pages before the end of the second chapter, thus leading into the third chapter. A similar subterfuge occurs in The War Terror (1915), although the twelve stories are divided into thirty-six chapters—roughly three chapters to one episode, with a few sentences added where necessary to accomplish the transition. The Social Gangster (1916) was the last group of short stories collected in this manner.

The Dream Doctor

The Dream Doctor was the first of Reeve’s attempts to group his stories thematically. As with the others—The Fourteen Points: Tales of Craig Kennedy, Master of Mystery (1925) and Craig Kennedy on the Farm (1925), for example—the premise is promising, but the results are unsatisfactory. The idea in The Dream Doctor of having Jameson assigned by his editor to report on Kennedy’s activities for a month is stronger than the theme of The War Terror, in which the war plays a part in only one of the episodes.

Elaine Dodge Trilogy

The episodes in the trilogy about Elaine Dodge—The Exploits of Elaine (1915), The Romance of Elaine (1916), and The Triumph of Elaine (1916)—seem embarrassingly melodramatic beside the earlier stories. The difference between the two groups may be one of degree, but the Elaine sequence seems more blatantly exaggerated. Written to promote three Pathé film serials, these are not cliffhangers, in which the audience awaits the next episode to learn the resolution of the previous one, but a series of interconnected episodes, each complete in itself, designed to advance the overall story line. (The American edition of The Romance of Elaine contains a truncated version of the second and third serials; the British edition contains the complete serial. The third serial was also published complete only in the British edition.) Craig Kennedy’s encounters with a masked archvillain, an Asian mastermind, a foreign spy, and a romantic alliance contrast strangely with his earlier dealings with financiers, Russian émigrés, and debutantes. Yet this film version, with the great detective portrayed on the screen by Arnold Daly, is the one many people recall when the name Craig Kennedy is mentioned.

A close reading of the text reveals that Reeve borrowed from himself in preparing these episodes for the screen. The termite that eats through the top of the safe in the initial episode of The Exploits of Elaine (“The Clutching Hand”) came from “The Diamond Maker”; the discussion of tire tracks and fingerprints as means of identification in the third episode (“The Vanishing Jewels”) is taken from “The Scientific Cracksman.” Both of these earlier stories are in The Silent Bullet (1912).

The Film Mystery

Reeve’s interest in motion pictures continued beyond these serial adventures of his hero. He wrote screenplays for several other films and based a 1918 pulp magazine serial (“Craig Kennedy and the Film Tragedy”) on his own experiences in the film world. Published as a book three years later (The Film Mystery, 1921), it is more interesting for its portrayal of the methods of making silent films than as a detective story.

Following a period of decline in the quality of his work as well as in the popularity of Kennedy, Reeve was persuaded by Leo Margulies, a pulp magazine editor, to let another writer adapt some of his old, unsold Kennedy stories for the pulp market of the 1930’s. As a result, four novellas by Ashley T. Locke appeared in Popular Detective from 1934 to 1935 and were collected under the title Enter Craig Kennedy in 1935. Reeve had hopes for Kennedy’s renewed success, if only the right format could be found.

Nostalgia for the golden age of the serials made him revive his archvillain, the Clutching Hand (who had not died in 1915), for a 1934 novel. A new film serial followed in 1936.

Having retained creative control, Reeve wrote a new Kennedy novel in which the detective tried to determine the value of astrology in solving the mystery. The results were inconclusive, and the contest between science and pseudoscience was ruled a draw. Readers of 1936 were more sophisticated than those of 1910, and the novel was not a success.

Reeve’s real contribution to the detective story lies in his portraits of the scientific marvels of his day, the social settings, and the relationships between rich and poor, banker and burglar, society matron and ingenue, which live in his simple prose. Craig Kennedy still represents the science of detection as it was understood in a less sophisticated world.

Principal Series Characters:

• Craig Kennedy , a professor of chemistry at an unnamed New York City university, uses the tools of science to solve mysteries and confront crimes committed with scientific devices. He treats most of his clients, as he treats his cases, with scientific detachment.
• Walter Jameson , a journalist with the New York Star, narrates most of the Kennedy stories. He and Kennedy were college roommates and still share an apartment. His air of perpetual astonishment at his colleague’s ability makes him the perfect foil.
• Inspector Barney O’Connor , who rises to the rank of first deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department as a result of Kennedy’s successes, consults the professor on a regular basis.

Bibliography

Cox, J. Randolph. “A Reading of Reeve: Some Thoughts on the Creator of Craig Kennedy.” The Armchair Detective 11 (January, 1978): 28-33. A critical examination of Reeve and his crime-solving chemistry professor.

Frank, Lawrence. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Study of Reeve’s immediate precursors and influences in the representative of science being used to solve crimes.

Harwood, John. “Arthur B. Reeve and the American Sherlock Holmes.” The Armchair Detective 10 (October, 1977): 354-357. Brief reading of Craig Kennedy’s use of science in relation to Sherlock Holmes’s own forensic scientific method.

Moskowitz, Sam. “Crime: From Sherlock to Spaceships.” In Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction. New York: Scribner, 1976. Looks at Reeve’s work at the intersection of mystery and science fiction.

Panek, LeRoy Lad. The Origins of the American Detective Story. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Study of the beginnings and establishment of American detective-fiction conventions that focuses on the replacement of the police by the private detective and the place of forensic science in the genre; provides perspective for understanding Reeve’s work.

Thomas, Ronald R. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Study of the mutual influence of mystery authors and forensic scientists on each other that sheds light on Reeve’s work. Bibliographic references and index.