The Silent Bullet

Craig Kennedy, professor of chemistry at Columbia, solves crimes with a lie detector, a seismograph, a spectroscope and a portable X-ray, and explains the apparatus as he goes. Reeve wrote eighty-two of these and was called the American Conan Doyle; half the instruments here did not yet exist in a police laboratory anywhere, and within twenty years most of them did. Fifty-six plates from Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler and their contemporaries, spanning 1856 to 1921, supply the period's faces, interiors and quiet still lifes that a laboratory detective story needs.