THE SILENT BULLET was the first volume of Kennedy stories, published in 1912. A brief introduction makes us aware that the hero is Craig Kennedy, professor of chemistry at Columbia University, and his Watson is his journalist roommate, Walter Jameson. Although Kennedy is a chemist, he appears to be adept in all sorts of branches of science, as are revealed in the stories. The first story is "The Silent Bullet," in which a supposed suicide in a brokerage firm turns out to be a murder committed with an exotic item, a silencer, and is solved by surreptitious use of that new invention, the lie detector.