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Kennedy, Craig. Craig Kennedy was created by Arthur B. Reeve (Belle Boyd, Elaine Dodge, Constance Dunlap, Robert Dupont, Hidden Hand, Hooded Terror, Pilot X) and appeared in 143 stories and serials and twenty-six novels from 1910 to 1936, beginning with “The Case of Helen Bond” (Cosmopolitan, Dec. 1910); an unauthorized version of the series, Dobrodruství Craiga Kennedyho #1-12?, appeared in Czechoslovaka in 1924.

Craig Kennedy is a Scientific Detective. He is a professor at Columbia University and uses modern technology and his knowledge of chemistry to solve criminal cases. The Craig Kennedy stories feature a large number of technologically-advanced (for the time) items, including lie detectors, gyroscopes, and portable seismographs that can differentiate between the footsteps of different individuals. Kennedy uses psychoanalytical techniques in his work as a consulting detective. Naturally, he makes use of the other, more traditional detective skills--a good left hook, mastery of disguise, an enthusiasm for action, etc--but the science and technology are the main thing, even to the exclusion of the gathering of proper evidence. During World War One he fights German air pirates. He is called on to help by Inspector Barney O'Connor of the N.Y.P.D.; Walter Jameson, Kennedy's roommate and a reporter for the Star, chronicles the stories.

* I'm including the Craig Kennedy stories and novels in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because Kennedy was an archetypal detective for about twenty years and because the stories about him were historically important in the development of short mystery fiction. The Craig Kennedy stories and novels were hugely popular in the 1910s and early 1920s, to the point that during those years, and really up until the advent of the hardboiled detectives of the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was the modern fictional detective (Sherlock Holmes was of course a creation of the previous century, and thus not modern enough for Kennedy devotees) for mainstream American detective fiction (Nick Carter (I) was the archetype of dime novel and early pulp detective fiction). And because of their popularity and Kennedy's recognized iconic status, the Kennedy stories were the primary in-genre influence on American fiction during the 1910s and to a lesser extent the 1920s. 

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