The Poisoned Pen

The Poisoned Pen is the second short-story collection in the Craig Kennedy series by the American author Arthur B. Reeve, first published by Harper & Brothers in 1911. It contains twelve detective stories that stand alone yet link together, narrated in the first person by the reporter Walter Jameson. The protagonist, Craig Kennedy, is a professor of chemistry at a New York university; whenever the New York police face a bizarre case, they come to the campus to ask this scholar for help. He relies less on logical deduction than on specialized knowledge from chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, optics and engineering, along with experimental devices he improves himself, to solve the puzzles. The title story, "The Poisoned Pen," is set in Danbridge, Connecticut: the young actress Vera Lytton dies from headache powder and ammonia in her dressing room, and the case draws in a senator's family and a young doctor. In the course of his investigation Kennedy notices a prescription with suspect handwriting and discovers that the ink itself holds another secret. The remaining stories concern "the forgery king," who counterfeits currency and fingerprints; "the firebug," traced through handwriting analysis; "the seeds of death," with clues found in a fermentation vat; and "the customs smuggler," tracked using invisible light, along with tales of thieves, tunnel diggers, white slaves, spies and election fraud. The Chinese translation, by Ma Qingjun, is included in the third series of Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House's "Stories from Beyond" collection; it is the first Chinese rendering of this century-old collection of detective short stories. The book preserves the original's fast pace and dense technical detail, as well as its wonder, more than a hundred years old, at the new sciences.