THE SILENT BULLET. THE ADVENTURES OF CRAIG KENNEDY SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE - 1912

New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912, 1912. First edition. First edition. Near fine copy with minor rubbing to the edges. The first Craig Kennedy novel and a Haycraft/Queen Cornerstone title, and a Queen's Quorum title. John Harwood says, "Reeve was the creator of Professor Craig Kennedy, one of the early scientific detectives. At the time of his greatest popularity he was called "the American Sherlock Holmes." Like Holmes, Kennedy had his "Watson" in the form of Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter. Unlike the great English detective, however, Kennedy depended more on scientific methods and gadgets, than on deductive reasoning." Beginning in 1910, Reeve began a series of detective short stories for Cosmopolitan Magazine. The series lasted until some time in 1918. The series was so popular that some of the stories were collected into book form in 1912 under the title THE SILENT BULLET, with the U. K. title being THE BLACK HAND. In some of the stories, he identifies the criminals by the use of identifying tire treads, the use of micrographs of various types of paper, the use of a silencer on a revolver, a microscopic examination of a bullet taken from a body would reveal the impressions of the fabric on the nose of the bullet, and many other methods of scientific investigation. Even the FBI benefitted from Reeve's method of identifying tire treads and established a system to identify all types of automobile tire treads. Queen's Quorum #49.