Scientific Sleuths

Cool idea. What scientist would make a good detective for a story, sort of like how Steve Allen wrote of himself solving murders. [Link]

Yeah, there's a swashbuckling Nikola Tesla book or two, and Einstein turns up in a few places, but that's not really the same thing. We need some good ideas for mystery novels in which improbable scientists turn to solving crimes.

So, a question for the audience:

What famous scientist should be featured as a detective in a mystery novel?

Remember, part of the fun of the genre is in having the amateur detective turn out to be as improbable as possible (I mean, there's a whole series of mysteries with Groucho Marx as the detective...). Richard Feynman would be an OK choice, but he makes much too much sense, as he's already a larger-than-life figure. Stephen Hawking would be much better.

My Choices:

• Leonardo Da Vinci The Original Renaissance Man
  
• Benjamin Franklin The First American, solving crimes with connections to Freemasonry in the Colonies or England at the Hellfire Club, or in France during the Revolutionary War
  
• Steve Wozniak Apple Computers (an engineer, not a scientist, but still interesting) He's really smart and quirky. Steve travels to your town and people start dropping like flies. It's Murder, she wrote for a new generation.
  
• Kernighan and Ritchie The C Programming Language, Murder at Bell Labs, with them as team detectives, with clues found in a user account on an early Unix system.