Résumé
Résumé de Le Docteur des rêves
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
Readers who love clever detectives, gadgets and the early days of forensic science will find many quick puzzles here, each with a new instrument, a new setting and a fresh set of suspects.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
The Dream Doctor is a linked set of detective cases by Arthur B. Reeve, written in the early twentieth century. They star Professor Craig Kennedy, a university chemist who fights crime with laboratory instruments instead of guesswork. The cases are told by Walter Jameson, a newspaper reporter who shares Kennedy's apartment and follows him from one crisis to the next.
The frame is simple. The managing editor of the Star orders Jameson to follow Kennedy for one month and bring back an intimate picture of the man at work. Jameson gets far more than he bargains for. Within days he is at a hospital, a beauty parlour, a banker's secret vault and a millionaire's museum, and the cases keep coming. Each one is built on a real scientific idea of its day, from the new psychology of dreams to wireless waves, blood tests and moving pictures of the heart.
You get the pleasure of a puzzle and the pleasure of learning how the puzzle is taken apart. Kennedy explains his tools in plain terms, and Jameson asks the questions you would ask. Let us begin with the case that opens the month, a death on Broadway and a dream that will not go away.
Dans ce résumé
- 1A dream and a note start the monthFree
- 2Poison hides in a beauty parlour
- 3A banker is besieged in his own vault
- 4A museum is haunted by a green curse
- 5Poisoned food and a drowned girl
- 6Thieves, a kleptomaniac and a vampire
- 7Bombs, drugs and a stolen submarine plan
- 8Ghouls in a cemetery and a man on death row
- 9What the cases add up to and how they are told
Point clé 1 sur 9
A dream and a note start the month
The month begins in the Star office, where the managing editor sends Walter Jameson home with a plain order. Follow Professor Craig Kennedy for thirty days and write down whatever happens. Jameson finds Kennedy reading a treatise by Dr. Freud of Vienna, and before he can finish explaining, the telephone rings. It is Dr. Leslie, the coroner, asking them to come to Municipal Hospital at once.
The dead man is Price Maitland, a broker. He was found reeling on Broadway that morning, and before an ambulance could arrive he could neither speak nor move a muscle. Hospital doctors tested for every drug they could name and found nothing. A typed note in his coat pocket, addressed to his wife Madeline, seems to say that he has chosen to end his life.
Kennedy does not accept it. People who plan to die, he says, scribble a hurried message by hand, and a typed one looks like an attempt to dodge the handwriting experts. He studies a tiny red swelling on the back of the dead man's hand and names a poison so rare that the usual autopsy cannot find it. The coroner and Jameson stare at each other, unsure whether to believe him.
What puzzles Kennedy most is something the doctors had treated as a curiosity. Mrs. Maitland, kneeling by the bed, cried out that she had dreamed of this death, and of a funeral procession with her husband's face in the coffin. Kennedy takes the dream seriously, which startles Jameson. He says only that dreams may be evidence.
The three people closest to the couple are soon in view. There is Mrs. Maitland herself, tall and nervous. There is Dr. Sheldon Ross, the nerve specialist who treats her, and Arnold Masterson, a polished traveller who was once engaged to her. Kennedy quietly collects sample pages from the typewriters in each place he visits. Everyone will be called to his laboratory that night, and the question is how a dream can point to a person.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Le Docteur des rêves
What is The Dream Doctor about?
It is a book of linked detective cases in which Professor Craig Kennedy solves crimes with science. The reporter Walter Jameson is assigned to follow him for a month, so each case brings a new puzzle, a new suspect list and a new instrument.
Who is Craig Kennedy?
Kennedy is a chemistry professor at a New York university who works as a scientific detective. He uses the microscope, the telephone, wireless waves, X-rays and psychology to find clues. His friend Walter Jameson tells his adventures for the newspaper.
Why is the book called The Dream Doctor?
The title comes from the first case, where Kennedy uses the new psychology of Dr. Freud to read a widow's dreams. A suspect mocks him as a dream doctor in scientific disguise. The name suits his habit of treating clues as symptoms.
Is The Dream Doctor based on real science?
Many tools in the book were real or newly invented when it was written, such as the string galvanometer, the detectaphone, the audion and X-ray motion pictures. The author blends these with fiction, so the stories show how people then pictured science and crime.