This is an annoyingly misleading book. Published in 1915 and with the title THE WAR TERROR, one would expect a novel dealing with Craig Kennedy in combatting espionage and sabotage. It is instead a group of twelve short stories which can pass for a novel only because of the one paragraph seques by which Reeve moves from one story to another.
The misleading is continued in a one page introduction signed by Walter Jameson which says that ...not all of these experiences grew...out of the war, but there were several that did..." If there were several, most of them must have been saved for another book. In this book, only the title story has any bearing on the war.
Now that I have gotten over my snit, I must say that I enjoyed this book. The title story is interesting as an adventure, in which a beautiful anarchist recruits Kennedy to save the life of a German financier/spy she has sworn to kill. In this one Kennedy's detection is of relatively minor importance and his participation is not necessary to abort both the murder and the espionage mission. But it is fun.
The other stories involve Kennedy in his usual role of uncovering murderers, thwarting blackmailers and disrupting heroin gangs through his scientific method. It has the virtue of most Kennedy stories in presenting not bad detection with a picture of the cutting edge of science in the second decade of the twentieth century. Among the delights are the use of a home-made hydrolysis machine to save the life a pet dog and at the same time prevent a murder.
Among the villains and villainies taken on in the book is the then popular and influential, but now discredited, eugenics movement. That story, "The Eugenic Bride", greatly raised my opinion of Reeve's intelligence and courage.
This is a pretty good short mystery story, set in London in the very first days of the First World War. It involves murder, espionage and the arrest of an innocent man, all presented through letters. It also involves a nice romance inaugurated through the agony colony of the Morning Post.
Like most short stories written at this period, the story involves a twist at the end. Alert readers will spot the twist coming. Those who do not appreciate the O. Henry style of short stories will probably be annoyed.
This is Biggers before his creation of Charlie Chan. Defenitely worth reading for mystery fans
This is a very good Craig Kennedy mystery. It begins with the visit of a professor of Archeology from the University who asks Kennedy's assistance in finding who stole an ancient Inca dagger from the items brought back from a recent Peruvian dig. While the Professor is still conferring with Kennedy, word comes that a wealth Peruvian has just been murdered--as it turns out, murdered with the stolen dagger.
Kennedy now has the problem not only of finding the dagger (and the murderer) but of protecting the beautiful daughter of the dead Peruvian. The characters include and American promoter and a mining engineer and Signora de Moche, and her son Alofonso, two Peruvians of Inca descent, who have an historical relationship to the dagger and a romantic relationship to the dead millionaire and his daughter. As much as the characters, Kennedy must apparently be wary of "The Curse of Manische."
This is a well-wrought story with an interesting plot and characters. Kennedy spends a good deal of useful time in the labroatory solving some collateral mysteries. The technolgical element, which sometimes overswhelms Reeve'short stories is kept under control here (except for an overly long discussion of the oxyaceteleyne torch. This is a good book.
I have read all of Arthur B. Reeve's Crag Kennedy novels published through 1920. This is by far the best.
Craig Kennedy is a professor at the University. But while he occasionally undertakes a case for a former classmate or student, in only one of the novels (THE GOLD OF THE GODS) does he appear to have any contact with the University or ts faculty other than the use of the laboratory.
Walter Jameson, the narrator of all of Kennedy's cases, is a newspaper reporter. But, except for occasionally dropping in on his editor and being assigned to follow Kennedy around, we learn nothing of the newspaper business.
Arthur Reeve, in addition to being a newspaper man and an author, had a career providing stories (if not scripts) to the film industry. This provides him with the setting for this novel, and makes reading it worthwhile in itself.
Reeve, of course, worked in the film industry when it was still centered on the east coast. His only mention of Hollywood in this book is a reference to "the California film colony" where an actor or actress can "break into" the film business and, with luck, be called to New York.
The book centers on the mysterious death of a leading actress during the filming of a scene from her newest film. Craig Kennedy is called in to find the murderer from a group of suspects which includes the head of the studio, the producer and the director of the film, the scriptwriter (the actress's ex-husband) and about half the supporting cast. The investigation travels from Tarrytown, New York to Fort Lee, New Jersey(then the center of the film industry) to the film stuion. Along the way there are more murders, mostly osmong the suspects, and an explosive fire in the film vault.
Kennedy solves the crime, as usual, through his scientific method, but he does engage in an interesting, if superficial, consideration of the psychological potential of each of the suspects not only to commit murder but to commit it in the ways that this murderer uses. This psychological approach may have been attempted to meet the changing demands of the reading audience. It was not enough, for in the decade following this book Philo Vance, Hercule Poirot and Ellery Queen came to dominate the field of mystery books, and Craig Kennedy was relegated to the pulp magazines. His next book was, THE STARS SCREAMED MURDER, was not published until 1936, the years Reeves died.
This is a collection of twelve short Craig Kennedy stories. It involves just the elements one expects from Arthur B. Reeve: numerous murders, discussion of technolies to apprehend criminals, and some interesting settings. On the whole, it is up to Arthur B. Reeves standards, althouth the quality of the individual stories varies widely. The two weakest are the title story, where in fact the mystery is solved by luck and is, in any case, rather arbitrary, and The White Slave, also solved entirely by Kennedy's luck, which also allows to escape criminal charges for assault. On the other had,The Sand Hogs, The Firebug, and The Smuggler are above average. The book should the reader an hour or so of enjoyment
I cannot quite explain this book. In the midst of the publication of the Craig Kennedy books, Arthur Reeve suddenly produced this book, promoted as "The first in the new Detective series." As far as I can tell it was the only Guy Carrick book. And what is the difference: Craig Kennedy was a professor of chemistry who uses science to catch criminals; Guy Carrick is a former professor of chemistry who operates as a private detective to use science to fight crime. Craig Kennedy has a roommate/narrator named Walter Jameson, a self-procalime yellow journalist who works for THE STAR; Guy Carrick has a roommate narrator named Thomas Warren who publishes a paper called THE SCIENCE NEWS, who has friends (not,apparently, including Jameson.) on the Star. I don't know if Reeve was trying to distiquish. between his novels and his collections of short stories or if he was changing publishers and there was a problem over the name of Craig Kennedy. (By the way, Warren is as certainly mystified by science as Jameson is).
This book is certainly up to Reeves best standards, involving the fight against a gambling ring, which includes murder, arson and kidnapping among its weapons. Garrick fignts the ring with the same panache and technological flair that Craig Kennedy would have used. It has the usual fault of Reeves books as mysteries that it is not a play fair mystery and that the villain is exposed by technology rather than reasoning
The is not a good book. In fact, it is a bad book.
In fact, the way to enjoy reading this is not as to read it as a book but to regard it as an interesting relic of the American silent film. This is a novelization of a film serial starring Harry Houdini. The serial was released at leat twice, once under the original name and once as "The Houdini Serial". It has all of the elements one would expect of a silent screen serial. Numerous chapters, each ending with either the hero or the heroine facing apparantly inescapable doom. The plot is drawn from the then current concerns of the newspapers: the original target of the villain is a corporation which buys patents from inventors, not with the intention of producing and marketing the invention, but to keep it off the market. The "Master" of the title is aparently an automaton with artificial intelligence. The hero, not surprisingly in Reeve novel is an intrepid scientist; not surprisingly for a Houdini movie, he is also an escape artist.
After reading this book, one could almost reproduce the original script, by putting a diagram to the left of each descriptive paragraph and "Story board" above each (rare) line of dialogue.
If you (or you children) enjoy Dr. Seuss books, or if you are old enough to have enjoyed the cartoon version of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, you will love this. You will also have a good time if you just wanted to see what could be done to liven up the fables of Aesop and LaRochfoucald. I first found some poems of Carryl fifty years ago in Louis Untermeyer's anthology of British and American poetry. By that time Carryl's books were out of print, and since that time even Mr. Untermeyer has dropped him. This is not great literature, but it is fun. In nowhere else, other than the two places I have mentioned, can you find such outrageously ingenious rhymes and such uproariously funny puns. If yous can interest your school age children in this book, it will have the additional benefit of broadening their vocabulary ( a great help on their SATs) since Carryl uses Words and doesn't (like Dr. Seuss) have to invent his rhymes.
Recent comments: User reviews
The misleading is continued in a one page introduction signed by Walter Jameson which says that ...not all of these experiences grew...out of the war, but there were several that did..." If there were several, most of them must have been saved for another book. In this book, only the title story has any bearing on the war.
Now that I have gotten over my snit, I must say that I enjoyed this book. The title story is interesting as an adventure, in which a beautiful anarchist recruits Kennedy to save the life of a German financier/spy she has sworn to kill. In this one Kennedy's detection is of relatively minor importance and his participation is not necessary to abort both the murder and the espionage mission. But it is fun.
The other stories involve Kennedy in his usual role of uncovering murderers, thwarting blackmailers and disrupting heroin gangs through his scientific method. It has the virtue of most Kennedy stories in presenting not bad detection with a picture of the cutting edge of science in the second decade of the twentieth century. Among the delights are the use of a home-made hydrolysis machine to save the life a pet dog and at the same time prevent a murder.
Among the villains and villainies taken on in the book is the then popular and influential, but now discredited, eugenics movement. That story, "The Eugenic Bride", greatly raised my opinion of Reeve's intelligence and courage.
Like most short stories written at this period, the story involves a twist at the end. Alert readers will spot the twist coming. Those who do not appreciate the O. Henry style of short stories will probably be annoyed.
This is Biggers before his creation of Charlie Chan. Defenitely worth reading for mystery fans
Kennedy now has the problem not only of finding the dagger (and the murderer) but of protecting the beautiful daughter of the dead Peruvian. The characters include and American promoter and a mining engineer and Signora de Moche, and her son Alofonso, two Peruvians of Inca descent, who have an historical relationship to the dagger and a romantic relationship to the dead millionaire and his daughter. As much as the characters, Kennedy must apparently be wary of "The Curse of Manische."
This is a well-wrought story with an interesting plot and characters. Kennedy spends a good deal of useful time in the labroatory solving some collateral mysteries. The technolgical element, which sometimes overswhelms Reeve'short stories is kept under control here (except for an overly long discussion of the oxyaceteleyne torch. This is a good book.
Craig Kennedy is a professor at the University. But while he occasionally undertakes a case for a former classmate or student, in only one of the novels (THE GOLD OF THE GODS) does he appear to have any contact with the University or ts faculty other than the use of the laboratory.
Walter Jameson, the narrator of all of Kennedy's cases, is a newspaper reporter. But, except for occasionally dropping in on his editor and being assigned to follow Kennedy around, we learn nothing of the newspaper business.
Arthur Reeve, in addition to being a newspaper man and an author, had a career providing stories (if not scripts) to the film industry. This provides him with the setting for this novel, and makes reading it worthwhile in itself.
Reeve, of course, worked in the film industry when it was still centered on the east coast. His only mention of Hollywood in this book is a reference to "the California film colony" where an actor or actress can "break into" the film business and, with luck, be called to New York.
The book centers on the mysterious death of a leading actress during the filming of a scene from her newest film. Craig Kennedy is called in to find the murderer from a group of suspects which includes the head of the studio, the producer and the director of the film, the scriptwriter (the actress's ex-husband) and about half the supporting cast. The investigation travels from Tarrytown, New York to Fort Lee, New Jersey(then the center of the film industry) to the film stuion. Along the way there are more murders, mostly osmong the suspects, and an explosive fire in the film vault.
Kennedy solves the crime, as usual, through his scientific method, but he does engage in an interesting, if superficial, consideration of the psychological potential of each of the suspects not only to commit murder but to commit it in the ways that this murderer uses. This psychological approach may have been attempted to meet the changing demands of the reading audience. It was not enough, for in the decade following this book Philo Vance, Hercule Poirot and Ellery Queen came to dominate the field of mystery books, and Craig Kennedy was relegated to the pulp magazines. His next book was, THE STARS SCREAMED MURDER, was not published until 1936, the years Reeves died.
This book is certainly up to Reeves best standards, involving the fight against a gambling ring, which includes murder, arson and kidnapping among its weapons. Garrick fignts the ring with the same panache and technological flair that Craig Kennedy would have used. It has the usual fault of Reeves books as mysteries that it is not a play fair mystery and that the villain is exposed by technology rather than reasoning
In fact, the way to enjoy reading this is not as to read it as a book but to regard it as an interesting relic of the American silent film. This is a novelization of a film serial starring Harry Houdini. The serial was released at leat twice, once under the original name and once as "The Houdini Serial". It has all of the elements one would expect of a silent screen serial. Numerous chapters, each ending with either the hero or the heroine facing apparantly inescapable doom. The plot is drawn from the then current concerns of the newspapers: the original target of the villain is a corporation which buys patents from inventors, not with the intention of producing and marketing the invention, but to keep it off the market. The "Master" of the title is aparently an automaton with artificial intelligence. The hero, not surprisingly in Reeve novel is an intrepid scientist; not surprisingly for a Houdini movie, he is also an escape artist.
After reading this book, one could almost reproduce the original script, by putting a diagram to the left of each descriptive paragraph and "Story board" above each (rare) line of dialogue.