Gun in Cheek Read Free Page A

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?"
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"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."
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    "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