"I'm so worried over Gloria, Professor Kennedy, that I hardly know what I'm doing." Mrs. Bradford Brackett was one of those stunning women of baffling age of whom there seem to be so many nowadays. One would scarcely have believed that she could be old enough to have a daughter who would worry her very much. Her voice trembled and almost broke as she proceeded with her story, and, looking closer, I saw that, at least now, her face showed marks of anxiety that told on her more than would have been the case some years before.

"Camera " Kennedy and I had been hastily summoned from his laboratory in the city by District-Attorney Mackay, and now stood in the luxurious, ornate library in the country home of Emery Phelps, the banker, at Tarrytown. "Camera -you know the call when the director is ready to shoot a scene of a picture?-well-at the moment it was given and the first and second camera men began to grind-she crumpled-sank to the floor-unconscious "

"It has always seemed strange to me that no one has ever endowed a professorship in criminal science in any of our large universities." Craig Kennedy laid down his evening paper and filled his pipe with my tobacco. In college we had roomed together, had shared everything, even poverty, and now that Craig was a professor of chemistry and I was on the staff of the Star, we had continued the arrangement. Prosperity found us in a rather neat bachelor apartment on the Heights, not far from the University.

"Jameson, here's a story I wish you'd follow up," remarked the managing editor of the Star to me one evening after I had turned in an assignment of the late afternoon. He handed me a clipping from the evening edition of the Star and I quickly ran my eye over the headline:

The Dream Doctor Arthur B. Reeve, american mystery writer (1880-1936) TABLE OF CONTENTS -01- ABOUT THIS BOOK -02- THE DREAM DOCTOR -03- THE SOUL ANALYSIS -04- THE SYBARITE -05- THE BEAUTY SHOP -06- THE PHANTOM CIRCUIT -07- THE DETECTAPHONE -08- THE GREEN CURSE -09- THE MUMMY CASE -10- THE ELIXIR OF LIFE -11- THE TOXIN OF DEATH -12- THE OPIUM JOINT -13- THE DOPE TRUST -14- THE KLEPTOMANIAC -15- THE CRIMEOMETER -16- THE VAMPIRE -17- THE BLOOD TEST -18- THE BOMB MAKER -19- THE COKE FIEND -20- THE SUBMARINE MYSTERY -21- THE WIRELESS DETECTOR -22- THE GHOULS -23- THE X RAY MOVIES -24- THE DEATH...

The Dream Doctor is a fix-up-in this case "fixed-up" from 12 short stories-of mystery and crime unravelled by the "scientific investigator" Craig Kennedy. Jameson, the Star reporter, and Kennedy's sidekick, is asked to stay with Kennedy for a month and give an insider's report for the Star's readers. As they rush from one case to another, Kennedy finds it even more hectic than he'd bargained for.