The Scientific Detective of Fiction

the Scientific Detective of Fiction

This is all legitimate, but tinged rather deeply with science. Craig Kennedy (created by Arthur B. Reeve) says:

"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.

"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 &Ding 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. "

However, Kennedy's methods and Descriptions, though interesting to scientific minds, are often above the heads of a popular audience. For instance such a paragraph as this, — and in his stories they abound:

"This twelfth series is interesting. So far only radium, thorium, and uranium are generally known. We know that the radio-active elements are constantly breaking down, and one often hears uranium,

for instance, called the 'parent' of radium. Radium also gives off an emanation, and among its products is helium, quite another element. Thus the transmutation of matter is, within certain bounds, well known to-day to all scientists like yourself, Professor Kennedy. It has even been rumored but never proved that copper has been transformed into lithium—both members of the hydrogen-gold group, you will observe. Copper to lithium is going backward, so to speak. It has remained for me to devise this protodyne apparatus by which I can reverse that process of decay and go forward in the table, —can change lithium into copper and copper into gold. I can create and destroy matter by protodyne. "