In The Ear in the Wall, Arthur B. Reeve brings Professor Craig Kennedy and his reporter-companion Walter Jameson into a world of clandestine surveillance, political intrigue, and modern urban anxiety. The novel's title evokes the new technologies of eavesdropping that fascinated the early twentieth century, and Reeve turns them into instruments of both crime and detection. Written in brisk, documentary prose, the book belongs to the scientific-detective tradition, extending the legacy of Sherlock Holmes into an American age of telephones, laboratories, and Progressive Era reform. Reeve, an American journalist and fiction writer, was best known as the creator of Craig Kennedy, often called "the American Sherlock Holmes." Educated at Princeton and trained in law, he combined legal curiosity, journalistic immediacy, and enthusiasm for contemporary science. His fiction reflects a period when forensic methods, electrical inventions, and public fears about corruption were reshaping popular ideas of truth and justice. This book is recommended for readers interested in classic detective fiction, early forensic imagination, and the cultural history of technology. It rewards attention not only as a mystery, but as a vivid record of how modern surveillance entered literary suspense.

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Arthur B. Reeve (1880-1936) was an American mystery writer. He is best known for creating the series character Professor Craig Kennedy, sometimes called "The American Sherlock Holmes", and Kennedy's Dr. Watson-like sidekick Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter. Kennedy is a scientist detective at Columbia University who uses his knowledge of chemistry and psychoanalysis to solve cases, and uses exotic devices in his work such as lie detectors, gyroscopes, and portable seismographs. Many of Reeve's novels were turned into films.