The Treasure-Train

Craig Kennedy, professor of chemistry at Columbia, against a gold shipment, a wireless telegraph, a poisoned needle and a war-time spy ring — with the apparatus explained as he goes. Reeve wrote eighty-two of these and was called the American Conan Doyle; half the instruments in them did not yet exist in any police laboratory, and within twenty years most of them did. Fifty-nine plates of painting from 1855 to 1924, among them John Sloan and W. J. Stevenson, trace the same turn-of-the-century world of laboratories, streets and war that Kennedy moves through.