Mystery

The headlines from all these cities and towns celebrated his triumphs. THE SHADOW SUCCEEDS WHERE POLICE FAIL. VON HEILITZ UNCOVERS LONG HELD SECRET, REVEALS KILLER. TOWN CELEBRATES SHADOW’S VICTORY WITH BANQUET. And here was the young Lamont von Heilitz, impeccable and taut as ever, looking straight ahead with a ghostly smile as a hundred men at long tables washed down venison and roast boar with magnums of champagne. He had managed to avoid photographers on all but two other occasions, on each of which he faced the camera as if it were a firing squad. He had captured or revealed the identity of The Roadside Strangler, The Deep River Madman, The Rose of Sharon Killer, and The Terror of Route Eight. The Hudson Valley Poisoner had been proven to be a poetic-looking young pharmacist with complicated feelings about the six young women to whom he had proposed marriage. The Merry Widow, whose four wealthy husbands had suffered domestic accidents, turned out to be a doughy, uninspiring woman in her sixties, unremarkable in every way except for having both a brown and a blue eye. A Park Avenue gynecologist named Luther Nelson was the murderer who had written to The New York Times identifying himself as “Jack the Ripper’s Grandson.” The Parking Lot Monster, of Cleveland, Ohio, had been one Horace M. Fetherstone, the father of nine daughters and the regional manager of the Happy Hearts Greeting Card Company. In all these cases, Lamont von Heilitz, the “renowned amateur consulting detective and resident of the island of Mill Walk,” had “offered invaluable assistance to the local police” or had “been helpful in providing evidence” or “by use of brilliant ratiocination, had advanced a coherent theory of the true nature and cause of the baffling crimes”—in other words, had done the work of the police for them.

Page after page, the cases went by. Mr. von Heilitz had worked ceaselessly during the late twenties and throughout the thirties. At a certain point in the late thirties, some of the news stories began referring to him as “the real-life counterpart of radio’s most famous fictional detective, the Shadow.” He camped in hotel rooms and the libraries and newspaper offices in which he did his research. The last of the detective’s photographs contained in the book accompanied an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled ECCENTRIC RENOWNED SLEUTH POUNDS BOOKS, NOT PAVEMENT and showed a man with greying hair seated at a desk buried under rifts of newspapers, notebooks, and boxes of papers. Except for the gloves on his hands, the excellence of his suit, and his habitual air of distinction, he looked like an overworked high school teacher.

The Shadow had abruptly left St. Louis after solving the murders of a brewer and his wife, refusing to grant any further interviews. (The Post-Dispatch: AFTER DEDUCTIVE TRIUMPH, ECCENTRIC SLEUTH GOES ON THE LAM.) After that, the flow of clippings continued, but contained far fewer references to the detective. In Boulder, Colorado, the murderer of a well-known novelist was found to be a local literary agent, incensed that his most lucrative client had intended to move to a New York firm; Boulder police credited the advice of a “self-styled amateur of crime” with helping them to identify the killer. Lamont von Heilitz was obviously concealed behind that phrase, and Tom saw his neighbor in the “anonymous source” who had assisted the police when a movie star was found shot to death in his Los Angeles bedroom; in the “concerned private citizen” who had appeared in Albany, Georgia, to give help to police when an entire family was found murdered in a city park.

In 1945, a letter from “an amateur expert in crime who wishes to preserve his anonymity” gave the police of Knoxville what they needed to arrest a local honor student for the murders of three of his classmates.