Danny Dunn, Scientific Detective

Danny Dunn, Scientific Detective is a novel for young readers by the American writer Jay Williams, published in 1975. It is the fourteenth book of the Danny Dunn series, which Williams wrote with Raymond Abrashkin until Abrashkin's death and then continued alone.

The series follows a boy who lives near a research laboratory and who is forever borrowing equipment from the scientists there, usually with consequences he did not intend. In this book Professor Bullfinch and Doctor Grimes are working on scientific ways of fighting crime, which gives Danny access to a bloodhound robot with a mechanical nose and a set of instruments for tracking and identifying things. He needs help with an ordinary school difficulty and gets the equipment, and then uses it on something larger when the manager of the local department store goes missing. Williams writes the books so that the scientific idea is explained as the plot moves, which was the point of the series when it began in the 1950s.

The Danny Dunn books were written over more than twenty years as juvenile science fiction and adventure, and this late entry keeps the same cast and the same interest in what the technology can actually do.