WHETHER it is possible these days for a man to commit a crime of which there is no possible means of detection, and not be found out, is simply the ancient problem of the immovable body and the irresistible force. The criminal, to-day, is bound to be caught, and the more a man studies a crime, the more art he spends on it, the surer he is of detection. That may sound paradoxical, but William J. Burns himself affirmed that proposition to me long ago.

      The hardest man to catch is the one who uses the simplest, crudest method. The thug blackjacks his victim and too often goes his way. Take, on the other hand, the bomb outrages that are worrying the police, just now. Those bombs were so very well made that the police are bound to catch the maker. Take again the recent sensational case of Dr. Arthur Warren Waite, the New York dentist who killed his father-in-law and his mother-in-law by arsenical poisoning, and had planned to kill his wife also. An examination of his private apartments brought abundant evidence to light that he had studied crime from a scientific standpoint and had endeavored to penetrate the secrets of the laboratory for the purpose of becoming a highly developed scientific criminal.

"The hardest man to catch is the one who uses the simplest, crudest method"

      He calculated to inoculate his victims causing them to die a commonplace "natural" death. I found in his desk a large number of microscopic slides which he had madethree or four hundred of them — showing germs of tetanus, anthrax, typhus and bubonic plague. He even went to Bellevue and tried to buy a tubercular mastoid bone, for the purpose of inoculating his victims. And yet this man, who might have become a master of scientific crime, used the most primitive poison in the pharmacopoeia when he came to despatch his victims. He needed money. It was the one passion of his life. Money — money, to gratify his extravagant and ever-increasing tastes. And so in his hurry he employed plain arsenic. Had it not been for the sheer intuition of a woman and that you know is woman's prime gift, mere man is not supposed to have it, and yet there have cropped up here and there instances, such as Lloyd George who is said to have rare intuition — he never would have been caught. Merely suspecting that something was wrong she sent a telegram suggesting an autopsy. And this disclosed the facts.
 

SCIENTIFIC CRIMINALS WHO BUNGLED.

I    NEVER was more disappointed — speaking from a purely scientific standpoint — in a case in my life. Here was a man who might with patience have developed into the arch-criminal of the ages — a very limb of Satan — who would have revealed to the authorities a new realm of detective research, and begun a new era in criminology. And yet because he was a spendthrift and must have money he despatches the victims, over whom he had spent laborious days and nights, by the commonest poison known — arsenic. Arthur Warren Waite lacked two of the great moral virtues — patience and the commonest sort of sense. Perhaps when the perfect type of scientific criminal is evolved he will be found to possess them all — must have them, as the very basis of his equipment.

      Sounds paradoxical, doesn't it? But crime is about the most paradoxical thing so far created. The perfect type of scientific criminal may evolve in the course of time, but thus far, at least, the more scientific he is the more sure he is to bungle, to leave some loose end by which he can be caught.

      Take the celebrated case of Carlyle Harris who killed a girl by the use of morphine. He simply bungled. He gave her too much. It was noticed that her pupils after death were contracted to pin-points — and that led to discovery. That was the only sign in an unsuspected case.

      The reader will remember how that case led to another. Dr. Buchanan, a dentist, when he heard of the Harris case, remarked: "Why didn't he give her a little atropine, and dilate the pupils?" That remark was remembered some time after when Dr. Buchanan himself stood suspected of murder. The body of his victim, as it proved, was exhumed and it was found that both atropine and morphine had been administered, so as to leave no trace even in the eyes. The Doctor was convicted.
 

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CRIME HAS PROVED

SCIENTIFIC crime "such as it is," as the boarder remarked when he passed the butter, if it has proved anything thus far has proved that there is such a thing as being too clever a murderer. Of course the old-fashioned, and still to some extent persistent order of "square-toed" detective will not catch him. But bless you: "the force" is improving all the time. And I am not even thinking of flattering either myself or the small army of detective-story writers when I say that we have simply got to take some credit for this ourselves. I have always found — since I began to write — that I was "great friends" with any real detective. I think I know one or two men at headquarters now, who, in the parlance of the street, would give me almost anything. A young man who had been reading my stories came in to see me from Chicago a year ago and announced that he was establishing a scientific crime-laboratory. He wanted to know what he needed. I introduced him to Osborne, the hand-writing expert — a first step.

      To speak boldly I consider Dr. Otto H. Schultze, medical adviser at the District Attorney's office of New York City, the nearest thing to a scientific detective there is in America. Perhaps there will always have to be a doctor in the case. You remember how Sherlock Holmes relied on Dr. Watson?

      I do not investigate crimes myself, only as a looker-on, a gatherer of evidence. I only write about them. And yet often I study the actual crime and figure it out by one of two methods: analysis or deduction. The former method was Poe's; the latter Conan Doyle's.
 

THE ART OF WRITING CRIME FICTION

I    CHASE the criminal up on paper and put him into print, in fictional guise. And it is the most exciting, interesting and complex chase in the world. Say I am working for material on an unsolved mystery. I sit down and figure out a perfect theory that seems to fit the facts exactly and then a new little fact will pop in that upsets everything, and knocks my theory sky-high. And intuition, which is the divine gift of the great detective, must not be allowed to stray. It must be sure and compelling — straight as the arrow to the mark. Yet intuition, or rather what seems to be intuition, too often turns into an infinite capacity for making mistakes due to hasty judgment. Then it is so easy by the law of opposites in theorizing to figure out that exactly what might have happened might not have. I have sat down and been able to figure out that a certain man could not by any possibility have done a certain deed — and it has been proven ultimately that he did. And here comes in the advantage the Police Department will always have over a deductive sleuth working by himself — the advantage of organization. Add science to organization and you've got the game beaten.

THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE STORY.

WHEN I wrote my first Craig Kennedy story, "The Silent Bullet," in 1909, it was turned down by every magazine I sent it to, and that was all of them. That story was a commuter. It had the highest mileage of any story ever written. I had endeavored to write the first purely scientific detective story. I had started something — and editors were afraid of it. The detective stories of Conan Doyle are not scientific, but deductive. The "science" in Conan Doyle is of the most elemental sort. Here is a grass blade — somebody has stepped on it. Here are some tobacco ashes, let's work them up. In my Preface to "The Silent Bullet," I introduce the scientific theory for the first time in an argument between Kennedy and Jameson, his Dr. Watson. Kennedy says, "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."

      The only reason why I started writing detective stories at all was simply that I had had a long education in Poe and Conan Doyle — and got to love them. It is so in every avocation. Poets, whom we have always been told are born not made, simply become poets because they love poetry and try to imitate what they love. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, perhaps our rarest lyric poet, confesses this frankly in his early letters. Allied closely to my own field is that of the greatest authority on the supernatural in literature in America who gives the same reason as I do: she came to write about ghosts in literature — as she states in the preface to her authoritative work "The Supernatural in English Literature" — because she came to love the ghosts!
 

POE FOUNDS THE DETECTIVE-STORY SCHOOL

WHAT really happened as we know was that Poe founded the detective story. "The Murders In The Rue Morgue" still stands unrivalled. We in America then did not dream what he had done when he gave us Auguste Dupin. On that single story was built up the whole school of French detective-story writers. One sheer laurel to Mr. Poe, at least! Conan Doyle in turn derived his inspiration from the Frenchman and from both the French and English writers the American writers got theirs. It is thus a peculiar evolution or rather involution which returns to the point from which it started. Undoubtedly the unique example in literature.

      It is rare enough indeed to find the detective story that is not lacking in one great quality — scientific imagination. Dupin, Poe's man, had it. Dickens was fast tending toward the mystery-story when he died. The last thing he wrote was "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." There may be a hundred solutions but nobody has ever found one. Perhaps some day when I'm not too busy I'll have Craig Kennedy dig up Jasper in Chinatown (New York City), fill him up with hop: and make him tell the real truth. I don't believe Jasper murdered his nephew. I think the jewelry was planted in quick-lime to throw suspicion on him. If Dickens could have lived ten years longer he would have been perhaps the greatest master of the detective-story that ever lived except Poe — could he have compassed another decade. Both of these men were in my opinion far greater geniuses that any who have followed them in this field. And what a supreme, perhaps sublime, master Dickens would have been in the film-world! Because Dickens thought in motion pictures. He darkened the shadows and heightened the lights and kept his characters moving. What wonderful "pictures" (I mean "movies ") some of his books have made. Great Expectations," "Oliver Twist," too, have made very wonderful pictures — best of them all was the "Christmas Carol."
 

THE OLD-FASHIONED DIME NOVEL.

BUT to return to our own, American, mutton. Let us consider the old-fashioned dime-novel — beloved as ever by the younger generation to this hour. The very inception of our own school of mystery-writers was here. There are many living who can remember how the dime-novel started with stories of hairbreadth adventure, chiefly of the Wild West. Of course there were pirate stories, and stories of other climes, but our own Wild West was the favorite stamping-ground of writer and reader alike. In the early seventies a change began to creep over the face of ten-cent fiction — by all odds the widest form in which literature circulated in those days. The Wild West was becoming tamed; the mystery of foreign lands had been largely dissolved by exploration. Exit the story of adventure, enter the detective-story. It is not generally known, and I being of the craft will certainly not be guilty of telling tales out of school, but a good many fiction-writers who have since become widely famous were early contributors to this form of literature. There is an old legend to the effect that these industrious persons and it was probably the most industrious period of their lives — always took Sunday as a day off and made up for it by doing 10,000 words a day for the rest of the week. Upton Sinclair has confessed that he did — and I know of one or two others. So were born the immortal Old Sleuth and his enterprising young successor Nick Carter and their progeny — "old" and "young" King Brady. Out of these finally evoluted the "dime novel in cloth-covers," a little less hasty in manner, but hardly less thrilling, at a dollar and a half, as we have it to-day.

      And all this body of work can be claimed as a distinctive contribution to American literature.

      The mystery-story is our meat.
 

SCIENTIFIC STORIES NOW THE FAVORITES.

THE boys of to-day are not reading the same things the last generation read. When I was a boy I worshiped Henty as all boys did. The previous generation had the same feeling for Oliver Optic. Boys don't read that kind of thing now. Their stories are built differently. The great sweep of science, beginning with the early Victorian thinkers, has had its profound influence even on the commonest literature. Our boys read scientific stories now. To-day there are whole sets of juvenile books relating adventures in a submarine. Stories about the wireless — the aeroplane — are the things boys devour now — and the detective-story. I know that I have quite a large number of readers among boys.

      On the other hand what appeals to women more than the mystery-story? It may seem strange but a large percentage of my readers are women. One would think that the science. in the tale would repel these gentle readers, but it seems only to attract them. You ought to look through a bunch of my letters. Seventy-five per cent of them are from women. I suppose the easiest way to account for it is that insatiable curiosity which is perhaps the strongest trait of the sex.

      At a dinner of engineers not long ago a discussion about the Craig Kennedy stories arose. It was discovered that several of those present had tried experiments suggested by them, and some interesting experiences were related. One man had filled a chimpanzee full of radio-active water and had actually got a photographic impression of the animal!

      Did you ever think of the vital American way we live? We are always going after mental gymnastics. Now the mystery-story is mental gymnastics. By the time one has followed a chain of facts through he has exercised his mind — he can't help it. There has never been a time when the mystery-story, in motion-pictures, in plays, in periodicals, in books, was in such demand. The adventure story, the travel story, the story of world-discovery, exploration, are back numbers. To-day it is the mystery-story. To-morrow it will be the mental adventure into those psychic realms we have only just begun to investigate. We have conquered everything; we have discovered everything, but the unseen world. We must find another dimension. And I think the means of expression will be revealed — on the screen!