The Silent Bullet

The contents of this book stem from a series of short stories originally in Cosmopolitan Magazine in the early twentieth Century.

University Professor Craig Kennedy was mulling over some of his theories: “It has always seemed strange to me that no one has ever endowed a professorship in criminal science in any of our large universities.”

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 newspaper, we had continued the arrangement. This pairing has often been compared to the Dr. Watson association with the renowned Sherlock Holmes. My name is Walter Jameson and I argued, “Why should there be a chair in criminal science … crime is just crime … the good detective is born and bred to it.”

“On the contrary,” replied Kennedy, “there is a distinct place for science in the detection of crime. We have professors of everything—why not professors of crime? 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.”

Listen now to the first of a half dozen adventures.