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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Stolen War-Secret," Arthur B. Reeve delves into the realm of early 20th-century espionage and political intrigue, weaving a gripping narrative that highlights the high stakes of wartime secrecy. Set against the backdrop of World War I, Reeve employs a mix of detective fiction and scientific innovation, characteristic of his literary style, to explore themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the struggle for power. The novel reflects the anxieties of its time, encapsulating the paranoia surrounding national security and the ethical quandaries of war-related espionage. Arthur B. Reeve, an acclaimed author and a pioneer in the genre of scientific detective fiction, was greatly influenced by the evolving landscape of technology and crime during his era. His experiences as an investigative journalist provided him with a unique vantage point from which to explore complex characters and intricate plots. Reeve's fascination with forensic science is evident in the clever mechanisms and ingenious problem-solving that drive the narrative, propelling the story forward while showcasing his knowledge in these fields. This compelling read is highly recommended for enthusiasts of mystery and thriller genres, as well as those interested in historical fiction rooted in real-world contexts. "The Stolen War-Secret" is a masterful exploration of human motives entwined with the suspense of wartime espionage, making it an engaging and thought-provoking addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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The Stolen War-Secret
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world poised for conflict, information becomes the most dangerous weapon of all.
Arthur B. Reeve, an American writer best known for pioneering scientific detective fiction in the early twentieth century, situates The Stolen War-Secret in an atmosphere of espionage, laboratory innovation, and national anxiety. Readers familiar with his work will recognize the hallmarks that made his fiction popular in magazines of the period: methodical inquiry, fascination with new technologies, and a brisk, investigative tone. Framed by the tensions and technological shifts associated with the World War I era, the book occupies a space where crime fiction meets spy narrative, reflecting the period’s preoccupation with secrecy, surveillance, and the stakes of modern warfare.
The premise is straightforward yet charged: a critical military secret vanishes, and an investigation begins under pressure, where every hour may tip the balance between national safety and catastrophe. The narrative follows a scientifically grounded inquiry that unfolds across laboratories, offices, and social spaces where influence quietly circulates. Reeve crafts a puzzle that invites the reader to observe evidence, infer motives, and consider the invisible circuits through which information travels. Without relying on grand battle scenes, the story generates its suspense from the contest over knowledge itself—how it is stolen, concealed, decoded, and ultimately contested by those who seek to wield it.
Reeve’s style emphasizes clarity and demonstration. He builds tension out of procedures, small demonstrations, and the incremental unveiling of cause and effect, a technique that mirrors the experimental logic that his fiction celebrates. The mood is taut and investigative rather than sensational, favoring lucid explanations of method over melodrama. The pacing reflects serial-era storytelling, with scenes that hinge on close observation, modest but telling revelations, and careful shifts in perspective. Readers should expect the steady accumulation of clues, the cool precision of laboratory thinking, and the moral and strategic ambiguities that arise when science intersects with statecraft.
Thematically, the book probes the double-edged nature of innovation. It asks how scientific breakthroughs migrate from the lab bench into the geopolitical arena, where, stripped of context, they become tools of leverage. It considers the ethics of secrecy in a democracy, the responsibilities of experts who straddle public and clandestine spheres, and the uneasy partnership between the press, industry, and government. At its core lies a question that resonates beyond its period setting: when knowledge can determine the fate of many, who should control it, and by what right? Reeve raises these issues without didacticism, embedding them in a compelling pursuit.
For contemporary readers, the relevance is immediate. The Stolen War-Secret anticipates debates over data breaches, industrial espionage, and the militarization of research that now unfold in digital spaces. Its focus on communications, cryptic exchanges, and the vulnerabilities of complex systems maps neatly onto concerns about cybersecurity and information warfare. The book offers a historical lens on dilemmas that feel distinctly modern: the balance between transparency and security, the speed at which innovations can be weaponized, and the human factors—ambition, fear, loyalty—that shape the fate of secrets in circulation.
Approached today, the book reads both as a period piece and as a bridge between detective procedure and espionage intrigue. It demonstrates why Reeve’s scientific approach to crime fiction helped shape later narratives that marry technology with suspense. Without spoiling the course of the investigation, it is enough to say that the drama rests on the forces that move information rather than armies. Readers will find an experience that is precise, cerebral, and quietly urgent, a story that captures how, in an age of accelerating invention, the control of knowledge can determine what is possible, permissible, and perilous.
Synopsis
Set against the anxieties of a world at war, The Stolen War-Secret follows scientific detective Craig Kennedy and his journalist companion Walter Jameson as they are drawn into a case involving a missing military invention. A confidential warning from Washington alerts them to a theft that, if not contained, could tip the balance of power. The narrative opens in New York, where industry, academia, and espionage intersect. An inventor’s laboratory, guarded and regarded as secure, has been compromised. With government pressure mounting and public disclosure impossible, Kennedy is asked to proceed quietly, relying on scientific methods rather than spectacle to retrieve the stolen secret.
Kennedy and Jameson begin at the scene of the theft, a modern laboratory whose benches bear the traces of hurried sabotage. The inventor, a cautious figure conscious of wartime obligations, explains the potential of his innovation without revealing specifics, underscoring the stakes. Security logs appear intact, yet subtle irregularities hint at a practiced intruder. A safe shows no obvious damage, a guard recalls little beyond a strange odor, and a scrap of scorched paper points to carefully planned destruction. Kennedy surveys air currents, chemical residues, and minuscule scratches, collecting samples and making quiet measurements that establish a framework for the inquiry.
As the early evidence is sorted, a small circle of individuals emerges. A gifted assistant, a visiting foreign attaché with cultivated manners, and a society figure with reformist connections each had proximity to the lab or its custodians. Kennedy refrains from premature accusations, instead mapping opportunity, motive, and technical capability. A newspaper advertising column, marked by peculiar phrasing, attracts his attention as a possible code channel. Using microphotography and reagents to develop latent traces, he uncovers invisible writing and notes on fibers that suggest intermediate handling. Jameson chronicles the process, conveying the stepwise logic as clues are converted into testable leads.
The investigation extends beyond the laboratory to the places where secrets are traded discreetly: hotel lounges, waterfront warehouses, and offices with unlisted tenants. Kennedy installs a recording device to capture a whispered conversation and uses radio direction finding to triangulate a burst of clandestine transmission. A loyal employee is momentarily placed under suspicion through planted evidence, revealing that the thieves anticipate conventional pursuit. Kennedy cautions patience, demonstrating how deceptive setups can be exposed through controls and repeatable tests. Gradually, a pattern of communications emerges, connecting inconspicuous messengers, diplomatic couriers, and a schedule aligned with transatlantic departures.
A pivotal development involves a woman with ties to both laboratory circles and foreign sympathizers. Her role appears ambiguous, shaped by coercion, loyalty, or necessity. Kennedy detects microfilm concealed in an innocuous accessory, and ultraviolet light reveals a message that had traveled in plain sight. Surveillance follows through cafés and elevated trains, charting exchanges that avoid direct contact. Coordination with federal agents remains discreet, respecting jurisdiction while preserving the investigation’s flexibility. The pressure grows as the suspected recipient prepares to leave the country. Technical clues and human behavior converge, suggesting that the theft is part of a broader network rather than the work of a lone opportunist.
Synthesizing his findings, Kennedy reconstructs the theft method with attention to materials and timing. A wax impression provides a key without alerting the victim; a subtle chemical induces drowsiness without alarming the guard; a heat-based tool leaves no visible scar on metal. The paper trail of the secret itself, possibly diffused to minimize detection, links to a cipher built from an everyday book. A reagent found on a suspect’s gloves recurs in traces at the laboratory, but Kennedy withholds conclusions, mindful that a single match does not settle agency. The investigation pivots from identifying a thief to disrupting a coordinated export of knowledge.
The pursuit becomes a race against the sailing of a liner and the closing of diplomatic pouches. Kennedy prepares a decoy, matching the appearance of the missing material while embedding forensic tracers that fluoresce under specific light. He introduces a harmless radioactive tag to monitor passage without overt search, and stages a controlled leak to force the conspirators into a revealing move. Jameson records near misses and misdirections, including a tense encounter on the docks that almost compromises the operation. The focus remains on containment: to prevent the war secret from leaving American soil, even if public recognition of the effort is impossible.
In the final movements, the conspiratorial structure appears in sharper relief. A rendezvous arranged by code brings principal actors into the open, and a scientific trap quietly closes around them. Legal and diplomatic constraints affect how the recovery can occur, prompting solutions that rely on evidence chains and jurisdictional timing rather than force. Kennedy maneuvers to neutralize the immediate threat and to ensure that the underlying network is identifiable to authorities. Personal consequences for those drawn into the plot are noted without sensationalism, and the status of the invention is resolved in a manner consistent with national security and the story’s emphasis on prudence.
The Stolen War-Secret presents a tightly sequenced account of wartime espionage contained by methodical inquiry. It emphasizes how modern detection—chemistry, photography, acoustics, wireless—can counter schemes that exploit bureaucracy and social disguise. Without dwelling on melodrama, the narrative illustrates the vulnerabilities of innovation and the importance of discretion when public confidence cannot be disturbed. Kennedy and Jameson’s partnership embodies a balance of observation, reasoning, and timely action. The book’s central message underscores vigilance and the responsible use of science, suggesting that the nation’s strength rests not only on new inventions but on the disciplined systems that protect them.
Historical Context
Arthur B. Reeve situates The Stolen War-Secret in the urban, industrial, and scientific milieu of the American Northeast during the First World War, with New York City—especially its universities, laboratories, and waterfronts—functioning as the central landscape. The mid-1910s setting (1914–1918) anchors the plot in an atmosphere of heightened vigilance, where munitions plants in New Jersey, corporate offices in Manhattan, and research facilities at institutions like Columbia University intersect with wartime secrecy. Rapid advances in communications, chemistry, and naval technology framed daily life, while newspapers fomented spy scares and the authorities tightened surveillance, creating a world in which scientific discovery and national security were inseparably intertwined.
German sabotage on American soil deeply shaped the context the story mirrors. The Black Tom explosion (Jersey City, 30 July 1916) destroyed vast munitions stores, shattered windows in Manhattan, damaged the Statue of Liberty, and caused millions in losses; the Kingsland/Lyndhurst blast (11 January 1917) devastated the Canadian Car and Foundry plant. Investigations later tied both to German agents, a conclusion affirmed by the Mixed Claims Commission (U.S. and Germany) decades later. Figures like Franz von Rintelen and chemist Walter Scheele were implicated in sabotage schemes; documents seized in the Wolf von Igel raid (April 1916) exposed networks. Reeve’s tale channels this reality by dramatizing industrial infiltration and the theft of sensitive designs.
The transition from U.S. neutrality to belligerency intensified concerns over war secrets. The sinking of RMS Lusitania (7 May 1915) and Germany’s 31 January 1917 resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare eroded public patience, while the Zimmermann Telegram—intercepted by British Room 40 and published in March 1917—galvanized opinion. Congress declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. The Preparedness Movement (1915–1916) and the National Defense Act of 1916 expanded the Army and bolstered coastal defense. In this climate, inventions related to naval detection, munitions, and communications acquired strategic value. The book reflects the urgency of shielding such innovations from espionage amid the fevered politics of 1917–1918.
Legal and policing frameworks of wartime secrecy are central to the world the narrative engages. The Espionage Act (15 June 1917) criminalized the disclosure of defense information; the 1918 Sedition Act broadened penalties for speech deemed disloyal. The American Protective League (1917–1919), a quasi-official volunteer force numbering hundreds of thousands, conducted surveillance and “slacker raids” in 1918. The Bureau of Investigation under A. Bruce Bielaski, alongside Military Intelligence and the Office of Naval Intelligence, expanded counterespionage. These measures protected war materiel but chilled civil liberties, particularly for German-Americans. Reeve’s scientific detective work echoes these structures, depicting collaboration with authorities and the moral ambiguities of intrusive investigation under emergency powers.
Industrial mobilization and the harnessing of inventors form a crucial backdrop. President Wilson established the Naval Consulting Board in October 1915, chaired by Thomas A. Edison, to channel scientific expertise into national defense. The Board promoted anti-submarine research, including hydrophones and sound-ranging, while the War Industries Board (from July 1917) coordinated production. Depth charges entered Allied service in 1916–1917; American laboratories and firms pursued acoustics and metallurgy at scale. New London Submarine Base (established 1916) and East Coast shipyards became hubs of innovation. Within this ecosystem, a “war secret” could plausibly be a marine detection device or ordnance improvement, the theft of which Reeve casts as both a crime and a strategic catastrophe.
The rise of chemical warfare further heightened the stakes of laboratory security. After Germany’s chlorine attack at the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April 1915), belligerents deployed phosgene (late 1915) and mustard gas (from July 1917). The United States created the Chemical Warfare Service on 28 June 1918, expanding research and production at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, and collaborating with university chemists—Columbia among them—on protective masks, absorbents, and detection methods. Industrial chemistry and toxicology thus became military frontiers. The narrative’s emphasis on formulas, reagents, and controlled access to laboratories mirrors these developments, suggesting that a stolen compound or protective technology could decisively shift battlefield outcomes.
Wartime communications security and cryptography shaped both policing and public imagination. Britain’s Room 40 (formed 1914) famously decrypted the Zimmermann Telegram; the U.S. Army organized MI‑8 (1917) under Herbert O. Yardley to systematize codes and ciphers. Federal oversight under the Radio Act of 1912 facilitated control of wireless traffic; the U.S. Navy seized the German-owned Telefunken station at Sayville, Long Island, in July 1915 and supervised Tuckerton, New Jersey, to enforce neutrality. Spies used invisible inks and microphotography; investigators exploited wiretaps and the detectaphone. Reeve’s story engages these techniques by depicting clandestine transmissions, scientific countermeasures, and the contested line between legitimate surveillance and illicit intrusion.
As a social and political critique, the book exposes the double edge of wartime modernization. It dramatizes how states and corporations convert knowledge into power, rendering laboratories and patents battlegrounds while inviting abuses of secrecy and surveillance. By tracing espionage through factories, docks, and universities, it implicates profiteering, xenophobia toward immigrant workers, and the curtailment of due process under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. The narrative’s reliance on scientific detection affirms public reason yet questions technocracy’s alliance with coercive authority. In portraying the theft of a “war secret,” it critiques a culture that commodified security, blurred civilian–military boundaries, and normalized extraordinary measures.
The Stolen War-Secret
I. The Mystery of the Spy
CHAPTER I
THE MYSTERY OF THE SPY
IT WAS during the dark days at the beginning of our recent unpleasantness with Mexico[1] that Craig Kennedy and I dropped in one evening at the new Vanderveer Hotel to glance at the ticker to see how affairs were going.
We were bending over the tape, oblivious to everything else about us, when we felt a hand on each of our shoulders.
“We’ve just had a most remarkable tragedy right here in the hotel,” a voice whispered. “Are you busy tonight, Kennedy?”
Craig and I turned simultaneously and found Michael McBride, the house-detective of the hotel, an old friend of ours some years before in the city detective-bureau.
McBride was evidently making a great effort to appear calm, but it was very apparent that something had completely upset him.
“How’s that?” asked Kennedy shaking hands.
McBride gave a hasty glance about and edged us over into a quiet corner away from the ticker.
“Why,” he replied in an undertone, “we’ve just discovered one of our guests—a Madame Valcour—in her room—dead!”
“Dead?” repeated Kennedy in amazement.
“Yes—the most incomprehensible thing you can imagine. Come upstairs with me, before the coroner gets here,” he urged. “I’d like you to see the case, Kennedy, before he musses things up.”
We followed the house-detective to the tenth floor. As we left the elevator he nodded to the young woman floor-clerk who led the way down the thickly carpeted hall. She stopped at a door, and through the transom overhead we could see that the room was dimly lighted. She opened the door and we caught a glimpse of a sumptuously furnished suite.
On the snowy white bed, in all her cold, stony beauty, lay the beautiful Madame Valcour, fully dressed in the latest of Parisian creations, perfect from her hat which breathed of the Rue de la Paix to her dainty tango-slippers peeping from a loosely draped skirt which accentuated rather than concealed her exquisite form.
She was a striking woman, dark of hair and skin. In life she must have been sensuously attractive. But now her face was drawn and contorted with a ghastly look.
There she lay, alone, in an elegantly appointed room of an exclusive hotel. Only a few feet away were hundreds of gay guests chatting and laughing, with no idea of the terrible tragedy so near them.
In the comer of the room I could see her maid sobbing hysterically.
“Oh—niña—niña,” cried the maid, whose name I learned afterward was Juanita. “She was muy simpatica—muy simpatica.”
“‘Niña,’” remarked Kennedy to us in an undertone, “means ‘little girl,’ the familiar term for mistress. As for ‘muy simpatica,’ it means, literally, ‘very sympathetic,’ but really can not be done justice to in English. It is that charming characteristic of personal attractiveness, the result of a sweet disposition.”
He looked down keenly at the woman before us.
“I can well imagine that she had it, that she was muy simpatica."
While Craig was taking in the situation, I turned to McBride and asked—
“Who was Madame Valcour—where did she come from?”
“You haven’t heard of her?” he repeated. "Well—I’m not surprised after all. Really I can’t say I know much about her myself—except that she was a beauty and attracted everybody’s attention here at the hotel. Among other things, she was a friend of Colonel Sinclair, I believe. You know him, don’t you—the retired army-engineer— interested in Mexican mines and railroads, and a whole lot of things? Oh, you’ve seen his name in the newspapers often enough. Lately, you know, he has been experimenting with air-ships for the army—has a big estate out on Long Island.”
Kennedy nodded.
“Rather a remarkable chap, I’ve heard.”
“I don’t know whether you know it or not,” continued McBride, “but we seem to have quite a colony of Mexican refugees here at the Vanderveer. She seemed to be one of them—at least she seemed to know them all. I think she was a Frenchwoman. At least, you know how all the Latin-Americans seem naturally to gravitate to Paris and how friendly the French are toward them.”
“How did you come to discover her?” asked Kennedy, bending over her again. “She couldn’t have been dead very long.”
“Well—she came into the hotel during the dinner-hour. As nearly as I can find out, the elevator boy, who seems to have been the only person who observed her closely, says that she acted as if she were dazed.
“They tell me her maid was out at the time. But about half an hour after Madame came in, there was a call for her over the telephone. The operator got no answer from her room, although the boy had seen her go up and the young lady who is floor-clerk on the tenth floor said she had not gone out.”
“Did the person on the telephone leave any message—give any name?” asked Craig.
“Yes. It was a man who seemed to be very much excited—said that it was Señor Morelos—just Senor Morelos—she would know.”
“What then?”
“Why, when he found he couldn’t get her, he rang off. A few minutes later her maid Juanita came in. The moment she opened the door with her key, she gave a scream and fainted.”
“Suicide?” I ventured under my breath to Kennedy, as McBride paused.
Craig said nothing. He was making a careful examination of both the room and of the body on the bed.
A moment later he looked up quickly, then bent down farther.
On her arm he had discovered a peculiar little red mark!
Gently, as if he would not hurt such an exquisite creature even in death, he squeezed a tiny drop of blood from the little puncture and caught it on a sterilized glass slide of a microscope, which he carried in a small compact emergency-case in his pocket.
He continued to rummage the room.
Thrown carelessly into a top drawer of the dressing-table was a chatelaine. He opened it. There seemed to be nothing there except several articles of feminine vanity. In the bottom, however, was a little silver box which he opened. There lay a number of queer little fuzzy buttons—at least they looked like buttons. He took one, examined it closely, found it rather soft, tasted it—made a wry face and dropped the whole thing into his pocket.
A HEAVY tap sounded on the door. McBride opened it. It was our old friend, Dr. Leslie, the coroner.
“Well,” he exclaimed taking in the whole situation, and hardly more surprised seeing us than at the strangeness of the handsome figure on the bed. “Well—what is all this?”
McBride shook his head gravely and repeated substantially what he had already told us.
There is no need to go into the lengthy investigation that the coroner conducted. He questioned one servant and employee after another, without eliciting any more real information than we had already obtained.
The maid was quite evidently a Mexican and spoke very little and very poor English. She seemed to be in great distress, and as far as we could determine it was genuine. Through her broken English and our own fragmentary knowledge of Spanish, we managed to extract her story, about as McBride had told it.
Madame Valcour had engaged her in Paris, where she had been taken and later had been thrown on her own resources by a family which had been ruined in the revolution in Mexico. As for a Monsieur Valcour, she had never seen him. She thought that Madame was a widow.
As the questioning continued, I read between the lines, however, that Madame Valcour was in all probability an adventuress of a high order, one of those female soldiers of fortune who, in Paris, London, New York, and all large cities, seem to have a way of bobbing up at the most unexpected moments, in some way connected, through masculine frailty, with great national and international events.
The questioning over, the coroner ordered that the body be sent down to one of the city hospitals where an autopsy could be performed, and we rode down in the elevator together.
