The Dream Doctor (Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective by Arthur B. ReeveMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is like New York's answer to Sherlock Holmes, except this detective is much more interested in electrical gadgets.
I enjoyed it, though it's pretty much just old pulp fiction. That's not a negative--I like pulp fiction, as a rule, and part of the pleasure in reading this is seeing what it reveals about tastes and interests of the time, meaning American readers around 1910 or so. The people wanted detectives, of course, and they like modern science. Strange to think of the early 1900s as modern, but it was.
[It does suffer here and there from the unfortunate attitudes and language of the time period.]
Kennedy uses recording devices, x-ray photography, a blood pressure device, and lots of things I didn't think existed 110 or 120 years ago. Some of it is kinda fanciful, but a lot of it is real--just much earlier than I thought people knew about it.
This book is basically a bunch of short stories stitched together, which makes it very breezy and fast-paced. I thought that was fine. A reporter is following him for a story, like his Doctor Watson, recording all of his exploits. I thought it was fun.
This stuff is all available as free ebooks. I'm reading it from an old bunch of hardcovers, which is more fun IMO, but the books are still out there. This isn't fine literature, but I recommend it and the others in the series for readers who are driven by curiosity as much as literary interest.
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