"Wanna Woo-woo?"

"... I have a plot for a book that I intend to write some day that I believe gets over the perfect murder most adequately. ... In that book I shall show that the police and detectives are utterly baffled and that at last the murderer himself has to come forward and tell how he committed the crime. I will have him to do this out of a pure sense of bravado and love of the dramatic, or possibly motivate it by showing that he is suffering from an incurable disease and is going to die soon anyway."

"Sounds like a lot of baloney to me," snorted Lang.

— Eric Heath, Murder of a Mystery Writer

"Fire's a damned sight worse," he muttered. "Cripes, my head's like a pumpkin! It's always at the back of my mind."

— Ellery Queen, The Siamese Twin Mystery

The amateur detective, or AD as he is affectionately known to insiders, is the most popular crime-solving creation among the writers of detective fiction. Beginning with Jacques Futrelle's Professor F. X. Van Duesen, "The Thinking Machine," in this country, and, somewhat later, Chesterton's Father Brown in England, the AD has seen more bloodletting, faced more peril, and unraveled more mysteries than all professional detectives, public and private, combined.

The AD can be of either sex, of any age; can possess any quirk or specialized knowledge and be of any profession (or no profession at all). The AD roster includes doctors, lawyers, merchants, thieves; little old ladies with a homicidal eye and fusty professors with very large brains; bored young men of wealth and breeding, and derelicts on Skid Row; newspaper reporters, poets, playwrights, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, unpublished writers, songwriters, and insurance underwriters; salesmen, bankers, Indians, artists, magicians, priests, nuns, gamblers, teachers, scientists, sports figures, photographers, publicans — and a hundred more. The AD can be hard-boiled, soft-boiled, half-baked, well-pickled, or sugar-coated. He/she can use fists, guns, wits, half-wits, innocence, guile, luck, pluck, deduction, guesswork, or any combination of these to solve a case and bring an evildoer to justice.

What the most enduring of the amateur detectives seem to have in common is an abiding interest in criminology, an encyclopedic knowledge of trivial and/or esoteric facts, a Sherlockian intelligence, a penchant for withholding evidence from the police (but never from the reader, no matter how obliquely it is couched), and such endearing qualities as the enigmatic smile, the gimlet eye, the curled lip, the disarming grin, the sharp retort, the clever pun, the cryptic remark, and the perfect squelch. Consider the great ADs of mystery fiction: Father Brown, Dr. Fell, Ellery Queen, Lord Peter Wimsey, Reggie Fortune, The Great Merlini, Miss Marple, Perry Mason, John J. Malone, "The Old Man in the Corner," Mr. and Mrs. North, Miss Hildegarde Withers. When these ladies and gentlemen embark on a case, it is bound to be a memorable one.

The same is true of the great ADs on the other side of the qualitative coin.

The earliest of these is Joseph Rouletabille, a Parisian reporter who solves a number of cases in the early 1900s narrated by his Watson, Sainclair, and created by French writer Gaston Leroux. The first, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), is well known and also considered by some — John Dickson Carr, the grand master of the "impossible crime" story, was one — to be among the finest "locked-room" mysteries ever penned. This may be true, if one reckons solely on ingenuity of plot; but if one takes into account stilted writing, nonexistent characterization, incredible coincidences, and a welter of disguises, aliases, and red herrings — plus such other implausibilities as the fact that Rouletabille, already a successful journalist, is not much older than sixteen when he solves the mystery of the yellow room — Leroux might seem better placed, or at least equally well placed, at the opposite end of the mystery spectrum.

From this standpoint, his most (or least) accomplished work is the second of the Rouletabille cases, The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1909). Chief among its noteworthy aspects is a preposterous plot in which the villain of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a brilliant former detective named Frédéric Larsan, who was supposedly killed off in that book, returns alive and in disguise (à la Sherlock Holmes) to commit a new locked-room murder, this one involving the use of false-face and a tricked-up wardrobe. There are also more aliases, red herrings, and coincidences, some crudely worked out motivations, a final "revelation" that Rouletabille is the illegitimate son of Larsan, and such artful prose as:

He rushed to the canal, sobbing, and, with a prayer, uttered as much to the Lady in Black as to God Himself, threw himself into the water. Happily, in his despair, the poor child had forgotten that he knew how to swim.

He had mocked her, even while the tears had streamed down his cheeks. I could never have believed that Rouletabille could have been so cruel or so heartless — or, even, so ill-bred!

The first of the notable ADs on the American front is Professor Herman Brierly, who appears in four novels by Will Levinrew published in the late twenties and early thirties. Brierly is an elderly research scientist of the following description: "small, exquisitely formed body, not over five feet tall; tiny hands and feet, bushy, snow-white hair, bushy black brows over dark blue eyes so deeply sunken in their sockets as to seem jet black; high, fresh complexion rarely found except in infancy." Brierly is also a superintellect of a crabby, somewhat egotistical nature that puts him in a class with his obvious role model, Philo Vance. His stock-in-trade is solving crimes through "scientific deduction," which is a masking euphemism for the fact that he unravels the most convoluted, Van Dineish plots with a minimum of detection and a maximum of obscure textbook science and pathology.

The most interesting of his cases is Murder on the Palisades (1930), in which a number of people are murdered in a gloomy old mansion on the New Jersey Palisades, across the Hudson River from New York City. Because Levinrew was a devotee of Van Dine, this novel, like his others, is chock full of footnotes, interminable question-and-answer sessions, befuddled cops, bizarre occurences, and clues of the esoteric variety (the first few letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, play an important, if rather unbelievable, part in the plot). But it is none of these things that distinguishes Murder on the Palisades; rather it is the sheer number of exotic methods of murder and attempted murder — certainly more than in any other mystery novel in the genre's history — and the identity of the "instrument" used in perpetrating most of the crimes.

Characters are murdered, or almost murdered, by the injection of microorganisms to cause spinal meningitis; by mixing a quantity of ergotized (ergot is a poisonous grain fungus) flour with whole-wheat flour and baking it into a loaf of bread; by poisoning some chocolate-coated almonds with almond-tasting nitrobenzol; by injecting a drug called phlorizin, which causes diabetes, so that the person can then be given too large a dose of insulin, which will send him into fatal insulin shock; and by scratching a man's hand with a match that has been dipped into a jar of hydrophobia germs. But the crowning method is a locked-room murder in which a missile, presumably a stone, is hurled through a window to crush a man's skull but then "disappears" before the police arrive on the scene seconds later. The explanation for this one is demonstrated as follows by Professor Brierly:

[They] suddenly saw an object, at the end of a rope, rise above the roof with incredible velocity. This object described a giant arc, and continued describing the arc, limited by the rope with undiminished speed. ...

The rope flattened out on the roof; the object at its free end continued with undiminished speed outward and downward, the rope flattened out against the rear of the building and the object at the end of this gigantic lash whipped through the closed window with a crash, shortly to reappear hanging taut at the end of the rope, oscillating gently.

According to the professor, this device — a large catapult affixed to the roof by bolts, with a rope stretching to it from a staple — works in the following manner:

"This rope is taut. I have at the end of it in the toe of this stocking a stone a little larger than a baseball. I tied a piece of string around the stocking above the stone, although hardly necessary. I now put it into the catapult which is aimed upward in the direction of the garage door, in perfect line with the window. The force of the catapult will shoot it almost straight upward, but the pull of the rope on that staple will prevent it from going straight upward. Also, it will not jerk as it would if I propelled it straight upward or straight outward from the staple. No, this counterforce will make it describe the arc you saw. Whirl a watch-chain and see the undiminished speed with which it will wind itself around your finger, to the very end. Same principle involved here. The initial impetus on the end of the watch chain is not around the finger, but straight ahead or upward as it is here. This staple acts like the finger on the chain."

The person responsible for most of these fanciful acts is an embittered member of the household, the wife of one of the victims, who has been confined to a wheelchair since suffering a paralyzing attack of poliomyelitis. It was she who worked the catapult from the roof, we are told, but since she couldn't get around to commit the other crimes, she hypnotized her twelve-year-old son, who is suffering from a form of dementia praecox, and ordered him to commit them in her stead. When Brierly has the boy hypnotized as part of his reconstruction of events and instructs him to reenact his crimes, the youth becomes "all evil, the personification of murderous desire," and the sight of him causes a hardened newspaperman to tremble "as if with the ague" and a hard-boiled cop, "inured to hardships in himself and others, familiar with ugly sights and scenes, exponent of the third degree with recalcitrant prisoners," almost to faint dead away. Brierly, however, is unmoved. Nothing much bothers the true scientist — -and the true AD — in his never-ending pursuit of truth, justice, and the American way.

A considerably different, if no less notable, amateur detective is Tony Woolrich, a New York drama critic fathered in the forties by Milton M. Raison. Woolrich's greatest case is Murder in a Lighter Vein (1947), about which Anthony Boucher wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: "This latest exploit of Tony Woolrich ... is in plot and writing simply down to Mr. Raison's standard. I list it only to warn you that this (to quote the jacket) 'intimate, behind-the-scenes tale of big-time radio' does not even have the virtue of reasonable accuracy in depicting the industry."

Murder in a Lighter Vein is set in Hollywood, to which city Woolrich has come to write a series of articles on its "little theaters." (Why anyone in New York would be interested in Hollywood's little theaters is not specified.) The first theater group with which he becomes involved is the Dramatic Arts Guild, a serious bunch that has selected for its first production Edmond Rostand's verse play, Cyrano de Bergerac.

The group is so serious, in fact, that they have picked up a sponsor to air a radio adaptation of the play and persuaded a stand-up radio comic of uncouth reputation to play Cyrano. The rationale for this decision is that the comic, Artie Aragon, has a very high Hooper rating — the radio equivalent of the Nielsen TV ratings — and it is felt Artie will pull a large audience and thereby launch the Dramatic Arts Guild into the big time. If the logic of this seems dubious, it is because Raison was a master of dubious logic — an art perhaps learned while practicing his alternate career of scripting screen potboilers.

Problems begin to develop when Artie decides he doesn't like the Cyrano script. It's not right for him and his image, he says. It doesn't have any boffo laughs. Worst of all, it doesn't have any "Wanna woo-woos?"

* * *

"Maybe I might look at a rough scrip'," hedged Artie. He turned to the Worths. "Get writin'. Fix up somethin' good. Put that dame [an actress named Sara] in lots of scenes with me. And don't forget to put in a couple 'wanna woo-woos.' "

There was dead silence as Rostand whirled in his grave like a dervish.

Parmalee finally cleared his throat and asked almost timidly, "A couple of what?"

"Woo-woos," said Artie impatiently, as though he was explaining something to an idiot. ... "There's a reason for it in all my scrip's. Wanna woo-woo made me what I am today."

"Wanna woo-woo?", you see, is Artie's big catch phrase, in the mode of Lou Costello's "I'm a baaaaaaaaaaaddd boy!" or Joe Penner's "Wanna buy a duck?" At some point in each of his radio shows, Artie looks at one of the female cast members, leers obscenely, grabs the microphone as if it were the woman, and says, "Wanna woo-woo?" For some reason, this is deemed hilarious by one and all, and the audience topples out of its collective seat and rolls in the aisle.

The various members of the Dramatic Arts Guild are shocked; they are artists, after all, and can't bear to see a wonderful play like Cyrano ruined with one-liners and "Wanna woo-woos?" They all hate Artie; so do his drunken wife, his well-endowed mistress, and his two "scrip'" writers. And so does Woolrich, who has a professed fondness for fine art. Of course, Tony also has a fondness for such fine art as one of the actresses, Sara, and is too busily engaged in making a play for her to worry about somebody knocking off Artie.

(You should not get the impression, however, that Tony is a playboy. Nor should you get the impression that he is suave, sophisticated, or has a scintillating wit. The best word to describe him might be "virginal." He blushes quite a bit, particularly when someone makes a sexual reference, and says things like "the moon fell on my head and burst into a million rose-colored bubbles" after an evening with Sara.)

Comes the night of the big broadcast. Artie's role in Cyrano has been completely rewritten to include plenty of boffo laughs and "Wanna woo-woos?" The audience, we are told, topples out of its collective seat and rolls in the aisle. The cast grimaces. Woolrich grimaces. Then, near the climax, Artie grabs the microphone in both hands, gives Sara a magnificent leer, and says his most obscene "Wanna woo-woo?" ever. Whereupon he falls down dead. No fanfare, no histrionics. He simply says "Wanna woo-woo?" and falls down dead.

Joe Holden, of the "downtown Homicide Squad," is called in. A preliminary examination of the body reveals no marks or signs of violence; could Artie have succumbed to a heart attack? Joe, who has the IQ of a house plant, conducts a superficial investigation, becomes frustrated, and turns to Woolrich for assistance; it seems he is in awe of Tony's AD abilities, having worked with him once before on a case. He asks the county sheriff to swear Woolrich in as a special deputy, complete with badge and gun and a salary of ten dollars a day.

Tony is overwhelmed by this. "Imagine," he says, "an undercover deputy at my age? It's like a bad B picture!"

Yes, indeed.

Joe and Tony do a considerable amount of running around, questioning and also bantering with suspects. Raison's long suit is sparkling repartee, as may be seen from the following two examples:

"Been having your tea-leaves read?" asked Tony.

"No. I guess I've had my intuition simonized."

"I've been wondering about you, Joe."

"Well, here I am, sister. If they kick me off the force, maybe you can make me a radio writer."

"Radio writers are not made; they're unearthed," she answered.

"You're a pretty good-looking corpse yourself, Betty," said Joe.

What seems like a long time later, inspiration strikes Tony. Despite the fact that the coroner has carved up Artie's remains and discovered no internal evidence of violence, Tony is convinced Artie was murdered. And he knows who did it and how it was done! He does some checking at the studio where Cyrano was broadcast, after which he has all the suspects assembled there in traditional AD fashion. Then he begins his reconstruction of the crime.