There is a long tradition of professorial sleuths. When Arthur Reeve's character Craig Kennedy first appeared in The Poison Pen (1911) he was hailed as the "American Sherlock Holmes". He used his brilliant powers of deduction to solve mysteries while working at a university in New York which is speciously like Columbia University. Clifford Knights's Huntoon Rogers in The Affair at the Scarlet Club (1937) was a professor of English in Los Angeles. He was a lively character who rarely taught, smoked too many cigarettes, and solved complex crimes. However, it was Gervase Fen, the Professor of English literature at Oxford who appeared in Edmund Crispin's The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944) who was to typify the absentminded-don who could nonetheless solve nearly impossible mysteries.