Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Stuart Palmer

Murder on Wheels (1932)

Murder on the Blackboard (1932)

The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937)

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941)

Miss Withers Regrets (1947)

The Green Ace (1950)

Nipped in the Bud (1951)

Cold Poison (1954) (Chapters 1 - 5)

People Vs Withers and Malone (with Craig Rice) (1950 - 1963)

Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (collected 2002)

The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl (1933)
The Riddle of the Flea Circus (1933)
The Riddle of the Brass Band (1934)
The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls (1934)
The Riddle of the Whirling Lights (1935)
The Riddle of the Tired Bullet (1948)

The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (collected 1947)

The Blue Fingerprint (1938)
Green Ice (1941)
The Riddle of the Black Museum (1946)

The Monkey Murder and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories (collected 1950)

The Purple Postcards (1939)
Tomorrow's Murder (1940)
The Riddle of the Double Negative (1947)
Fingerprints Don't Lie (1947)

Howie Rook stories

The Stripteaser and the Private Eye (1968)

Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles is available from Crippen & Landru, and The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla, Miss Withers Regrets and Nipped in the Bud from Rue Morgue Press. (I am not associated with Crippen & Landru or Rue Morgue Press, and have no financial ties with either publisher whatsoever.) The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers and The Monkey Murder and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories are very rare old paperbacks, long out of print. I have never actually seen copies of these last two books, but have read many, but not all, tales from them, in magazines and anthologies.

The above is not a complete list of Palmer's fiction. It is the stories I enjoyed reading, and personally recommend.

Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer's detective tales usually feature either Hildegarde Withers, a spinster sleuth, or, less frequently, Howie Rook, the least hard boiled of all private eyes. Palmer's tales are generally comic in tone, but he is not a member of the "farce school" of Phoebe Atwood Taylor. Rather Palmer's works adhere to the classical detective paradigms of the intuitionist school, of such writers as Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. Reading Palmer's best works show why this school is so well loved: watching Hildegarde Withers unravel "The Riddle of the Black Museum" (1946) is just plain fun. There is a detective, a mystery, and an ingenious solution, and one experiences a strong desire to read more stories like this.

Palmer and Anna Katherine Green

Hildegarde Withers is a snoopy middle aged spinster of great respectability and intelligence, who continuously horns in on the cases of Inspector Oscar Piper of the New York police. This is exactly the setup of Anna Katherine's Green's tales of spinster Amelia Butterworth and police detective Ebeneezer Gryce. One wonders if Palmer was directly influenced by Green, or if he was more familiar with such intermediate writers as Mary Roberts Rinehart. Palmer also uses the comic tone so prevalent in the "spinster sleuth" writings of Rinehart and Green. Palmer's work is also especially rich in the detective work one associates with Green. Much of a Palmer novel is taken up by the rich sleuthing of Withers and Piper, where they delve into hidden features of the past, and track down leads galore. This sleuthing is very well done. It recalls the detective work done by another Green influenced writer, Agatha Christie.

Palmer and S. S. Van Dine

The collaboration of an amateur sleuth and the New York Police recalls the work of the Van Dine school of the 1930's as well. There is certainly a relation here: at the very least the familiarity of this setup probably helped Palmer's work gain acceptance among publishers and readers. And the first book in the series, The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), mentions both Sherlock Holmes and Philo Vance as famous fictional sleuths (Chapter 9), although partly to disassociate Palmer's sleuths from what he calls the "super-sleuths" of fiction. This is the only reference I know of to Vance in Palmer's work, but Holmes is a life long enthusiasm, discussed countless times in Palmer's tales. However, Palmer's work seems quite different in tone from Van Dine's and his followers' (Ellery Queen, Anthony Abbot, Rex Stout, C. Daly King, Rufus King). Hildegarde Withers has no upper class connections, being a maiden school teacher of middle class respectability but modest means. And Inspector Piper seems to be of a distinctly working class origin, unlike many leading characters of the 1930's. There is a great deal of emphasis in the books on how he worked his way up from patrolman. There are no fabulously complex plots, à la Queen or Abbot, no nursery rhymes or other formal schemes imposed on the books.

If Palmer is quite different from Van Dine's greatest followers, he does show more similarities to Van Dine himself. The storytelling in Palmer's first books has a Van Dine like feel, with different murder suspects weaving in and out of a well paced murder investigation. Palmer sometimes deals in moderately impossible crimes in these books, just like Van Dine. By moderately impossible I mean less overwhelmingly complex than Carr, with much simpler explanations, and also which are often crimes which seem at first glance to be more puzzling, unexplainable, or inexplicable, than totally impossible. Palmer also shares with Van Dine an interest in puzzling or out of the way murder methods, methods which initially baffle the police.

There is a Van Dine-like attempt to depict criminals as Nietzschean geniuses, in such early works as Murder On Wheels (1932). This early book also builds up various New York policemen who work for Piper as continuing characters, in the manner of the Van Dine books, although here again, Palmer adopts a comic attitude to these policemen, something antithetical to Van Dine's approach. Murder On Wheels also looks at an extended family of wealthy New Yorkers, all of whom live together in a old mansion, which recalls such Van Dine books as The Greene Murder Case and The Kidnap Murder Case. There is also a VanDinean tendency towards footnotes in Palmer's early books.

Palmer's works are full of characters in the arts, and in show biz. These are the favorite backgrounds of Van Dine school writers. The dog breeders of "The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders" (1934) also recall Van Dine's The Kennel Murder Case (1933). But in general, Palmer was less interested in hobbyists and collectors than were Van Dine or Ellery Queen. Palmer also rarely includes floor plans of crime scenes, unlike Van Dine.

Palmer's first Withers novel, The Penguin Pool Mystery (1931), also seems influenced by Ellery Queen's first book, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). Inspector Piper is somewhat similar to Inspector Richard Queen. Both novels take place in a crowded public location in New York City (a theater in Queen, the Aquarium in Palmer). And the clues about men's hats in both novels have much in common. There is a similar clue about men's hats in Rufus King's first Lt. Valcour novel, Murder by the Clock (1928 - 1929). There seems to be a mass pile up of similar plot ideas in the early works of these three VanDineans.

Van Dine knew Anthony Abbot: Abbot's autobiography records their friendship. (Thanks to Bill Vande Water, for pointing this out!) But it is not clear in Van Dine ever met any other of his literary followers. He was a best selling novelist when they all started out in obscurity, imitating his works. By contrast, many of them seemed to know Palmer. In the 1930's Palmer lived across the street from Anthony Abbot. He was friends with Ellery Queen. He worked at the same New York ad agency as Richard Lockridge, although perhaps at different times. An inscribed copy of Murder on the Blackboard, offered for sale in 2006 on the Internet, reveals that Palmer knew Harry Stephen Keeler (T. S. Stribling also knew Keeler). Palmer's inscription reads: "To Harry K - who played mid-wife at its birth chez Brentano, and who didn't care to learn what little girls are made of. With sincere affection tempered with other things. Stuart Palmer, July 1, 1933". And Palmer collaborated on a movie and a book of stories with Craig Rice.

One common factor of most of the Van Dine School: the unusual 1930's mystery magazine, The Illustrated Detective Magazine. This magazine emphasized both horror, and impossible crime stories. In its pulp contemporaries, such horror-based impossible crime tales were known as weird menace. This magazine, which later changed its name to Mystery, also was aberrant among pulps in that it published the work of numerous Golden Age authors, including such Van Dine school members as S. S. Van Dine himself, Ellery Queen, Stuart Palmer, Anthony Abbot, C. Daly King, as well as Mignon G. Eberhart, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. Palmer published his first Hildegarde Withers short story in it, "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), and 10 others during 1933-1935. It is hard to know whether Mystery was a pulp magazine, or not. It is fully indexed in Cook and Miller's invaluable checklist of the pulp magazines, but other reference works include it among the slicks. Most of Palmer's tales for Mystery have recently appeared in book form as Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (collected 2002).

Around 1940, Palmer would go on to write Withers short tales for the New York Sunday News. This tabloid newspaper was sold nationally throughout the US, was famed for its comic strips, which it often shared with the Chicago Tribune, and was astonishingly popular, having a circulation in 1946 of over four and a half million, reportedly the largest of any US newspaper of the era. Palmer's short tales would also appear in its sister paper, the Chicago Tribune, such as "Green Ice" (1941). After 1945, Palmer short stories seem to have appeared exclusively in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

Palmer Mystery Plots

Many of Palmer's best puzzle plot stories show structural features in common. These include the novels Murder On Wheels (1932), The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937) and The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941) and the short stories "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), "The Riddle of the Brass Band" (1934), "The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls" (1934), "The Riddle of the Hanging Men" (1934), "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (1935), and "The Riddle of the Tired Bullet" (1948), all in the collection Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles; "Autopsy and Eva" (1954), "Rift in the Loot" (1955) and "Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers" (1959) in People Vs. Withers and Malone; "Green Ice" (1941), "The Monkey Murder" (1947), "Fingerprints Don't Lie" (1947) in other collections.

The following discussion tries to stick to general architectural features. But it still might contain SPOILERS. One is advised to read all of the above, entertaining Palmer mysteries, before continuing with the rest of this article.

These Palmer works have a central mystery plot, one that usually concentrates on the murder in the story. This mystery will be a "howdunit": it will not be clear physically how the murder was committed, and the detectives and readers have to try to figure out the exact murder method. Sometimes, the crime will seem so mysterious that the work will be an actual "impossible crime": a murder that looks completely impossible to have happened. Other times, the crimes will seem "natural", but still unexplained in method, till all is revealed at story's end.

Surrounding the murder mystery will be subplots. These plots tend to be well-constructed mysteries of their own. Sometimes they relate to the central murder mystery; other times they are red herrings thrown across its path. Neither of these two kinds of subplot is directly a murder mystery.

Palmer is especially fond of two kinds of subplots. One can be dubbed the Strange Person. One of the characters will be highly unusual. This person has many unique characteristics. And they consistently behave in a way throughout the story that is original, and not at all like the average person one might meet in real life. At the end of the tale, Palmer usually has some sort of revelation about the person, that ingeniously explains some of their surface personality and behavior. This explanation often gives us a new understanding of that person's identity.

The other subplot centers on a character who is Mysteriously Involved with the crime. Often times this person's entry in the tale is itself mysterious: we do not know who they are, or what role they will play through the story. Even more centrally to this kind of subplot, is the character's role throughout the tale. The Mysteriously Involved person keeps getting connected to the crime. Sometimes these connections are suspicious looking, that imply again and again that they might be the guilty party. Other times, they entangle the Mysteriously Involved person in the complex storytelling that surrounds the murder plot. The repeated links are varied, ingenious, and surprising, and involve a wide variety of plot approaches, everything from physical evidence to alibis. They pop up throughout the story, and gradually create a complex series of intricate links. Each link tends to be somewhat separate from the one before it, involving its own ingenious little mystery plot element.

The central howdunit, and the subplots of the Strange Person and the Mysteriously Involved, occur again and again in Palmer works. They form a common architecture for Palmer's tales. All three are deeply plot oriented. They help Palmer construct elaborate, ingenious puzzle plots for his mysteries.

The locales for Palmer's murders are often high, steep, vertical places. These include the site that eventually emerges in Murder On Wheels, the steep museum stairs in "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl", the front of the office skyscraper in "The Riddle of the Brass Band", the side of the ocean liner and its higher and lower decks in The Puzzle of the Silver Persian, the steep stands around the bullfight arena in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla, standing on the chair in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan, the high narrow house and embankment in "The Riddle of the Tired Bullet". These are all stories that came out of Palmer's howdunit paradigm. Such vertical locales seem much less common in Palmer works based on other plotting approaches.

Symmetry

"The Riddle of the Black Museum" (1946) and "The Riddle of the Double Negative" (1947) are richly plotted stories that seem to have nothing in common with Palmer's howdunit-Strange Person-Mysteriously Involved architecture. Instead, they build up complex, symmetrical patterns out of alibis and testimony. The symmetric form in these tales is almost mathematical, as the title "The Riddle of the Double Negative" suggests. Palmer's ability to create ever more unfolding flows of complex plot in these works perhaps has a little in common with his Mysteriously Involved patterns, which also involve complex plotting. But the resemblance is not close. There was a bit about alibis in the Mysteriously Involved portions of "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), which Palmer built upon for the virtuosic treatment in "The Riddle of the Double Negative".

"Once Upon a Train" (1950), the first story in People Vs. Withers and Malone, is also built around symmetry. The hiding of the body is symmetrical, and so are the main mysteries about the victim and the killer. The relationship between the entrance of the red-head and Miss Withers into the tale also has some symmetric aspects. And there is a subtle symmetry about the framing of Malone, with this part of the story echoing its earlier cause in reverse. Both this framing, and the main murder plot, are symbolically represented by Hildegarde's dream. The victim and the killer plots echo and greatly amplify the plot twist in The Penguin Pool Murder about men's hats. This early Palmer novel seems to be the seed out of which later exercises in symmetrical patterning grew. A symmetrical pattern about dressing-gowns in "The Riddle of the Double Negative" is also in this tradition, although it shows a further twist.

One can see some echoes in "Once Upon a Train" of some non-symmetry-oriented Palmer tales, as well. The civic corruption among social leaders stems from "The Riddle of the Tired Bullet", as does the theme of a large amount of cash floating around. The Impossible Disappearance of the money recalls the theft in "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl". Both "the victim and the killer" matched-subplots embody somewhat the Strange Person approach. The train setting recalls Palmer's travel novels, in particular the opening chapters of The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla, which are also train set.

The main puzzle plot, in the opening and finale of The Green Ace (1950), has a little in common with these earlier symmetry short stories, especially "The Riddle of the Double Negative". But it lacks the full symmetrical patterns they build up. The murder in "The Riddle of the Jack of Diamonds" has plot elements that recall The Green Ace, but which are less related to the symmetry short stories. Also, The Green Ace, "The Riddle of the Jack of Diamonds", and "The Riddle of the Double Negative" all take place in a similar milieu, that of chic, pseudo-sophisticated well-to-do New Yorkers. One rich person is often supporting a spouse or lover in these tales, something that also appears in "Once Upon a Train", and there is a good deal of cheating going on sometimes, as well. Palmer's disapproval of this crowd comes over loud and clear.

Among mystery writers, Allan Vaughan Elston shares Palmer's interest in symmetrical plots. Elston's "Drawing Room B" (1930) is a symmetric story set on a train, like Palmer's "Once Upon a Train" (1950).

Palmer's Themes

Both Murder On Wheels and The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941) show some unusual features in construction. Both books' solutions eventually show that they contain a murder mystery, and another mystery, related to the murder plot, but which involves different characters. This subsidiary mystery is actually far more ingenious, and far more complex, than the actual murder case. The murderer and his machinations are something of a let-down in both tales, in fact, while the subsidiary plot shows good craftsmanship. In both books, the subsidiary mystery has the form of an ingenious conspiracy, an attempt by characters to benefit from a complex scheme by working together. Collaboration is a key Palmer theme, and many of the solutions to his mystery tales focus on one sort of ingenious collaboration or another.

Murder On Wheels also shows a commitment to female equality, with the detective duel between Withers and Piper explicitly symbolizing a debate over the capabilities and equality of women. It is perhaps paradoxical that the male-authored Miss Withers is far more openly feminist than the female-authored Miss Marple. (Similarly, Lawrence Blochman treats female business people with great respect in Recipe For Homicide (1952)). By contrast, the non-Withers female characters in the Palmer books tend to be rather golddigger like, often trying to entrap men into marriage for financial gain. One might also point out that there is a male golddigger in "Tomorrow's Murder" (1940), hoping to marry a rich woman, and the sleazy press agent in The Green Ace (1950) is supported by his rich wife. Hildegarde Withers stands out in complete contrast to these women, as an independent woman who earns her own way, and who relates to men on a position of complete equality.

Palmer is interested in dreams, and altered states of consciousness. This seems like an odd interest in a writer who otherwise is so respectable. "Tomorrow's Murder" and "Green Ice" are especially interesting in this regard. One might also mention Miss Withers' gas attack in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan, and the truth serum in Miss Withers Regrets. There is also a tendency for Hildegarde Withers to seek a solution to her murder cases in her dreams: she has a spectacular dream sequence in Chapter 10 of The Green Ace, and a case-related dream in "Once Upon a Train" (1950). One of the few really good ideas in the otherwise lamentable The Puzzle of the Red Stallion is the old man's dream in Chapter 4, and its subsequent role in the finale of the tale. The dream sequence that opens Before It's Too Late also seems personal for Palmer.

The interest in tropical fish in Palmer's tales also seems oddly related to this: people stare into brightly lit fish tanks, and they are into another world, one filled with strange colors and movement. Palmer also shows a persistent interest in jewelry in his tales, with the brightly colored gems also playing a somewhat trance-like role. The jeweled sculpture of "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933) is itself in a glass museum case, like an aquarium. Many of his story titles includes either color words or precious materials, such as Pearl, Marble, or Amethyst. The planetarium setting of "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (1935) also takes one into a visionary world of light and movement, as its title suggests.

Animals are another persistent Palmer theme; dogs, fish, horses are especially common in his tales. His tale "The Jinx Man" (1952) expresses interest in the then brand new concept of a terrarium. And "The Riddle of the Flea Circus" (1933) extends this interest to the insect kingdom, as well as snakes. Bulls and snakes show up in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla, with Piper and Miss Withers being compared memorably to ants at one point in their investigation.

In Nipped in the Bud, Palmer has Hildegarde doodle when she is trying to get her subconscious ideas to flow. Palmer was an artist himself, and there are other references to doodling in his books: I think Inspector Piper doodled in Murder On Wheels.

Palmer often reused titles from one work to another, subtly altering them in the process. He wrote two novels, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1940), followed by Unhappy Hooligan (1956). (Happy Hooligan was a prominent early comic strip.) His story "Green Ice" was followed by the novel The Green Ace. And the chapter in The Penguin Pool Murder called "The Rift in the Lute", was followed many years later by a short story called "Rift in the Loot". "The Rift in the Lute" is a quotation from Tennyson's Idylls of the King (Merlin and Vivien). This interest in wordplay contrasts with the denunciation of puns in The Penguin Pool Murder, where Miss Withers brands them the lowest form of humor. Palmer loved poetry, starting out as poet himself, and often quoted it in his novels.

The limiting factor in Palmer's fiction is that some of it seems second rate in terms of plotting. This is especially true of his later, post 1947 tales. Some of the novels I have read seem padded, and some short stories dull. While Miss Withers, Inspector Piper and his other characters are always likable, Palmer had a lot of trouble coming up with first rate plots for his tales. Palmer is especially weak on motives; the killer's motive as revealed at the end of the tale, often seems arbitrary and perfunctory. Hopefully, there are some outstanding stories lurking in Palmer's vast output that can be added to my list. Right now, there is nothing like a "canon" of Palmer's works that would help direct readers to his best fiction.

People Vs. Withers and Malone

The best Palmer book I know about today is People Vs. Withers and Malone. This is a short story collection written in collaboration with Craig Rice. It features a collaboration between their two detectives, the acerbic Miss Withers and the Runyonesque lawyer John J. Malone, and is virtually unique in detective fiction history in that it involves the collaboration of two authors' detectives. (E.C. Bentley and H. Warner Allen's detectives collaborate briefly in Trent's Own Case (1936). Later, in the 1980's, the married couple Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini would sometimes pool their series detectives.)

The Hildegarde Withers Novels

The Penguin Pool Mystery

The first novel in the Withers series, The Penguin Pool Mystery (1931), disappoints. Its atmospheric opening murder investigation in New York's Aquarium is pretty good, but there is not much of a puzzle plot to it, and the book gradually drifts off into mediocrity. It is disconcerting to see the Inspector treat Miss Withers as a murder suspect, and a lot of the characters are unlikable; the book is consistent with Palmer's later work in showing marriage and romance to be based on the most cynical and distasteful motives. The book has a horror atmosphere, like Murder on the Blackboard, and only a little of Palmer's trademark humor. I liked Palmer's sketch of the murder scene; like the art in his next two novels, it has an interesting schematic quality. Like them, it attributes the artwork to Hildegarde Withers herself. Oddly enough, the movie version of the book mirror reverses the parity of the Aquarium: what goes from left to right in the book's illustration, goes from right to left in the film's sets. The novel is set in late 1929, shortly after the stock market crash; the murder victim was a stockbroker, and both the crash and the workings of the stock market are portrayed in the novel with some sophistication. It is unclear whether the novel was written then, and publication delayed till 1931, or whether Palmer set his book as a "historical novel in the recent past", always a somewhat unusual approach. Palmer sets much of the novel among the world of successful businessmen, perhaps because he is trying to follow the Van Dine tradition; but somehow he feels ill at ease among these characters. Much is made in the book of the fashionable clothes worn by these wealthy men, and the chief clue actually revolves around men's hats. One senses in Palmer an uncomfortable mixture of admiration, envy and distaste for such businessmen. (Decades later, he is still expressing ambiguous attitudes towards businessmen in "The Jinx Man" (1952) and "People Vs. Withers and Malone" (1963).)

In later and better books Palmer will find much more of a niche among showbiz types, whether the rodeo and film buffs (Murder On Wheels), publishing ("The Riddle of the Brass Band"), burlesque ("The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls"), a bullfight (The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla), Hollywood scriptwriters (The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan), New York theater people ("The Riddle of the Double Negative"); vaudevillians (The Green Ace), early live TV (Nipped in the Bud), an animation factory (Cold Poison), or the circus (Unhappy Hooligan). He describes all of these types very well, and his novels form a sort of unofficial social history of the lower echelons of show business.

Murder On Wheels

Palmer's second-finest novel, considered as a puzzle plot, is Murder On Wheels (1932). Murder On Wheels adheres more closely to the canons of Golden Age fiction than Palmer's later fiction. While Palmer's mystery gimmicks here are easily guessed, his labor of love ingenuity in attempting to create a full fledged Golden Age detective novel can make some enjoyable reading. In Golden Age style, Murder On Wheels contains many mini-mysteries along the way. How did one character's pocketbook disappear? Why does a woman suddenly marry a man she doesn't love? These mini-mysteries are all eventually given ingenious explanations, which relate to part of the surprises in the solution. Palmer is in fact relentless at trying to create ingenious ideas for every aspect of his plot in this book. Some of the ideas work, and some don't, but he is really in there trying. He would be more relaxed about this in later books, often trying to come up with one central ingenious concept, and letting Withers' and Piper's sleuthing carry the rest of the tale.

Murder On Wheels has some structural features in common with the later The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla. Both stories are "howdunits": the detectives and reader are challenged to figure out exactly how the killings each book take place - as physical acts they are difficult to explain. This brings both tales to the borderline of the impossible crime. The killings are linked with devices used by the rodeo in Murder On Wheels and the bullfight in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla, making further similarities

Also, both books have interesting mystery subplots dealing with the suspects, subplots that add to the complexity of the story. There are two such extra subplots in each book. And each such subplot deals with a different character. In both books, the subplots add to the romantic element that pervades the stories: there is an ongoing boy meets girl romance in both works, and the subplots greatly entangle this. None of the four subplots involves murder. There has sometimes been a wish expressed by mystery writers and fans that authors could write mysteries that did not involve murder. Publishers usually demand a murder mystery as the central element of most books. But writers can and do create mysteries that do not involve murder, or even any crime, as subplots and red herrings in novels. These Palmer books are good examples.

Murder on the Blackboard

Murder on the Blackboard (1932) has more horror and less comedy than the typical Palmer work. It moves to the opposite extreme of Murder on Wheels, its immediate predecessor. Here the puzzle plot elements are perfunctory, but the atmosphere and storytelling click. It seems like a personal work, somehow, after the attempt to imitate Golden Age formulas in Wheels: here Palmer is trying a pure expression of his storytelling gift. The architecture of the school holds a special interest to Palmer: the early chapters (I to V) describing Withers' school, together with later sleuthing in the school's basement (chapters XI and XII), are among the best things in the novel, with the school building laid out as a full scale scene of Golden Age mystery, just like the house in Murder On Wheels. It is often said, by Kathleen Gregory Klein and others, that old mysteries are valuable documents of social history; certainly this book gives a vivid impression of an apparently typical New York City public school. The architecture of the building reminds one a bit of the school in Henry King's film, Remember the Day (1941).

The horror atmosphere in this novel reminds one a bit of C. Daly King's later The Curious Mr. Tarrant. There is the same emphasis on hidden spaces, the same interest in basements, the same appearance of men out of nowhere, and a similar look at mad, fiendish killers. Even the craft cabinets (with the Presidents) in Palmer's novel seem somehow reminiscent of the vault and its exhibits in King's "The Vanishing Harp". The titling schemes of Palmer and King also seem parallel, with Palmer's "Riddle of" and "Puzzle of" being echoed in King's "Episode of". There is also a common use of the Metropolitan Museum as a setting in both authors: in Palmer's "Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), and in the first tale in King's collection. The 1934 film version of Murder on the Blackboard is terrible, one of the dullest in the series, although it is quite faithful to the book.

The Puzzle of the Silver Persian

The Puzzle of the Silver Persian (1934) does not have a clever mystery solution, although there are some brief "howdunit" aspects early on (Chapter 4), which directly echo the killing in Murder On Wheels. Nor does Hildegarde Withers do much actual detection, normally a Palmer strong point. In fact Hildegarde does not get to display much personality at all throughout the book, and there is little humor. The characters tend to be Society types engaged in sordid intrigues, rather than the pleasantly raffish characters of Palmer's best work. All in all, a disappointing novel.

The novel's best feature is its storytelling. Palmer constantly keeps the pot boiling by adding new twists and events, often fairly interesting. This technique is often used in his short stories, and Persian seems constructed like one of his short stories, only on a very large scale. This abundance of plot helps make the book pleasantly readable. There are many unexpected interactions among the characters; it is as if Palmer is always looking for ways to tie together the two most unlikely characters he could associate. The novel also shows a good progression, by having its three thirds set on board ship, in London, and finally in Cornwall. Palmer would later set his Sherlock Holmes pastiche in Cornwall. One has a feeling on reading the book, that it is based on an actual trip Palmer made sometime. Palmer makes a cat be one of his characters; such a technique is common in today's cozies.

The Puzzle of the Red Stallion

On the downgrade, The Puzzle of the Red Stallion (1936) is awful. The best part of this book is Chapter 7, in which Hildegarde gets arrested, and in which there is some good Dr. Thorndyke like detective work concerning pipes. The dream sequence in Chapter 4 is also inventive. The faithful but dreary film version of this book is also the poorest of the Withers films.

The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla

The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937) is one of a series of Withers novels with travel backgrounds, each with its own mode of transportation and destination. The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933) starts out on a plane going to Catalina; The Puzzle of the Silver Persian (1934) begins on a ship to England; and The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla has a similar construction, starting out with a long train ride, followed by scenes in its destination, Mexico City. This is one of Palmer's most successful experiments in integrating travel locale and mystery. The Mexican background is vividly realized throughout, with Palmer exploring some new locale in every chapter. Palmer's Mexico is a tourist one, not a deep sociological study of daily life in that country, but it is refreshingly dignified and free from negative stereotypes. The literal colorfulness of the Mexican background, and the many scenes at night lit by candles or flashlights, have some of the hallucinatory qualities that in other Palmer works are provided by jewels or tropical fish tanks. The central section of the book (Chapter 8) takes place at a bullfight. This is the only part of the novel on Palmer's home turf of show-biz, broadly defined. The bullfight echoes the rodeo in Murder On Wheels, and the Mexican locale as a whole returns in Nipped in the Bud.

The central murder mystery of The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla shows structural similarities with the short tale "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (1935). Both stabbing murders take place in public, in large crowds of people attending some spectacular show-biz event at a specialized auditorium. Both tales are impossible crimes, and both are "howdunits", in which the mystery is to explain how a seemingly impossible stabbing took place. Both involve their characters in traveling across the country, on mysterious errands. In both, Hildegarde searches someone's room, and pretends to a landlady that she is a suspect's relative. Although the two tales have a common architecture, the details of the crime and mystery are different in both works.

Aside from its howdunit aspects, the solution of the murder in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla is not ingenious. The choice of the murderer echoes mystery clichés, and is easily suspected. The killer's motive, often a weak point with Palmer, is poorly done. This lack of a creative finale is the book's biggest weakness.

The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla does show ingenuity throughout, however, by constantly bringing its large cast of suspects into an involvement with the plot, and making many of them involved in baffling and mysterious situations. Palmer had a special skill of sheer storytelling, in which he could spin the actions of his characters into a continually unrolling plot. He does a good job of making some characters constantly at the center of suspicious looking mysteries. One can describe Julio Mendez as a Strange Person, and Dulcie Prothero as Mysteriously Involved. In fact, both are classic examples of these kinds of Palmer mystery subplots. As noted earlier, both the basic howdunit of the central murder mystery, and the subplot mysteries involving the personal lives of some of the suspects, recall the overall structure of Murder On Wheels.

Geometric imagery is associated with all three crimes: the perfume bottle is hexagonal, the bullfight arena is a huge circular bowl, and the stab hole in the chair at the end is triangular in cross section.

One wonders if this story influenced later writers. The Lockridges' Voyage into Violence (1956) has a similar travelogue structure. And Anthony Boucher's The Case of the Solid Key (1941) has a subplot that can be read as a creative variant on the Julio Mendez plot in Palmer. Like Palmer, both the Lockridges and Boucher are members of the Van Dine school.

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan

My favorite Palmer novel so far is The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941). This book has many solid virtues: an ingenious twist in its mystery plot, although parts of the solution are uninspired; some pleasant comedy; good sleuthing by his well characterized detectives; and an interesting background depicting the Hollywood studios of its era. It makes pleasant reading, as long as you are not expecting a great classic along the lines of The Three Coffins or Roger Ackroyd.

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan shares some features with earlier Palmer novels. The central murder is another of Palmer's howdunits, a bit closer to the one in Murder On Wheels, than the elaborate stabbing in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla. Here, however, it is hardly an impossible crime, and it has the least elaborate and inventive solution of any of these three books.

The book is notable for not just one, but two Strange Person subplots. The subplot about Buster recalls a bit the tale of Julio Mendez in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla. Both subplots in turn have a slightly more distant relationship with the brothers in Murder On Wheels. The subplot about Derek Laval in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan is also related to the brothers in Murder On Wheels. All of these are some of the most important Strange Person subplots in Palmer's novels. All three novels thus show Palmer's construction around a common architectural plan, with a central howdunit murder, supported and flanked by similar Strange Person subplots. All of the details of the murders and subplots are different in each book, however.

The two obnoxious screenwriters who are central characters here recall the writing duo in a Broadway play that is still remembered for its spoof of a Hollywood studio, Samuel and Bella Spewack's Boy Meets Girl (1935). Palmer's novel was probably influenced by this.

Miss Withers Regrets

Miss Withers Regrets (1947) is apparently unique in Palmer's output. It is maybe his only traditional country house murder, a kind of book that was popular in the Golden Age, but which Palmer rarely wrote. The light-hearted tale is fun, with a house full of suspects. There are a few of Palmer's show business types around, but the characters mainly include types archetypally related to the country house mystery, such as the doctor, the lawyer, the gardener and the butler. These characters are almost as rare in Palmer as the country house setting, and show his desire the try his hand at this traditional sub-genre. The setting is not quite the country, however, being instead a well-to-do Long Island suburb, a locale frequently used by Ellery Queen.

The plot of Miss Withers Regrets seems to have nothing to do with Palmer's howdunit-Strange Person-Mysteriously Involved paradigm. There is indeed some debate about how the first murder was committed, but it never looks quite as impossible as in Palmer's true howdunits. Nor does the story show the Symmetry that Palmer used in other tales, although the male and female dressing-rooms at the pool, perhaps anticipate the two drawing rooms in "Once Upon a Train" (1950), which are also occupied by a man and woman.

The main weakness of the murder mystery plot in Miss Withers Regrets is poor motive, once again. There is no good motive for the killings.

Otherwise, the several subplots of Miss Withers Regrets are well done, with lots of pleasant ideas.

The swimsuit recalls the ideas about men's clothes in The Penguin Pool Mystery, although this is an unusual variation on them. There were also swimsuits in Palmer's film Step by Step (1946), although they were not linked to any mystery puzzle there.

The subplot about the victim's profession has some relation to the subplot about the postcards in "The Purple Postcards" (1939).

The clever idea about the footprint in the second murder recalls Palmer's ingenuity with fingerprints in "Fingerprints Don't Lie" (1947) of the same year.

Four Lost Ladies

Four Lost Ladies (1949) is a disappointing mystery. It hardly has any plot. We learn early on that a Bluebeard killer is romancing and killing women for their money. Then nothing happens with the mystery plot till the end of the book - in which we learn which one of the suspects is the killer. There are no real clues to the killer's identity: Palmer could have picked the killer at random from the suspects in the novel. Miss Withers engages in lots of activity - but it is hardly detective work, in any strict sense. For much of the novel she tracks down and acquires some possessions left behind by the murder victims, in the vague hope it will lead to some insight into the mystery. It doesn't. She interviews and gets character sketches of the suspects. None of this really advances the plot at all.

Four Lost Ladies is perhaps an attempt by Palmer to de-emphasize mystery plotting, and instead get closer to the novel of suspense. The suspense novels of Cornell Woolrich had made a great impact in the 1940's, and Palmer is perhaps following this trend. Some of the plot aspects here are Woolrichian. The opening scene recreates the overheated emotional life of one of the victims, and tries to generate some suspense, both types of scenes which frequently occur in Woolrich (and which he does much better than Palmer). The first killing takes place from a fall from a hotel, like Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black (1940) and "The Room With Something Wrong" (1938). We have a young girl coming from a small town to New York City, to try to track down the killer, as in Woolrich's Deadline at Dawn (1944). We have women going undercover to try to bait the killer, as in Woolrich's Phantom Lady (1942). Most of this, aside from the opening chapter, is delivered in Palmer's jaunty, more-or-less humorous tone. Palmer would publish a non-series, somewhat Woolrich-like suspense novel the next year, Before It's Too Late (1950), which I liked even less than Four Lost Ladies. Palmer's home turf is the true puzzle plot mystery, to which he brings his strong plotting skills. These books are a detour.

Four Lost Ladies is liveliest in Chapters 4-6, in which Miss Withers and her young bobbysoxer friend Jeeps get involved directly in the mystery. Palmer shows ingenuity with his storytelling, especially Jeeps' on-going attempts to keep involved with the investigation. The plot ingenuity here involves Withers' and Jeeps' investigations, not the murder mystery itself - but it is nicely ingenious all the same. These are also the sections in which most of the characters are introduced and most richly portrayed. Much of the book's actual substance is in these chapters, which would have made a pleasant novella.

Imagery and plot ideas from Four Lost Ladies recur in the short story "Autopsy and Eva" (1954). In both stories, Withers tries to track down a victim's luggage. This is connected more meaningfully to the plot in "Autopsy and Eva": it actually has something to do with the murder mystery. In both tales, the search for the luggage brings new characters into the story: something also done more elaborately and with richer plotting in "Autopsy and Eva". Both stories take us extensively into Withers' home, both show us charming portraits of her poodle Talleyrand there (who makes his debut in the Withers saga in Four Lost Ladies), and in both Withers takes on as a roommate a beautiful, nice young woman who is sympathetically involved in the mystery plot.

The Green Ace

The Green Ace (1950) is a late entry in his series of detective novels featuring Hildegarde Withers. This is one of those books, like Freeman's The Mystery of Angelina Frood (1922), in which, at the solution, every clue that the reader has been laboriously following turns out to be faked by the criminal, the product of a lie, or simply irrelevant. In these books the solution seems to have little to do with the clues the detective work previously dredged up. Sometimes this approach is good, but usually it just seems annoying to me, almost like a cheat. At least Freeman's book is one in which the solution contains a "thundering surprise" in compensation, to quote a phrase of John Dickson Carr, but Palmer's book has nothing that ingenious. Palmer's solution is logical, legitimate and fair, but it is certainly not very creative. Since the puzzle plot of The Green Ace is disappointing, I should supposedly be giving a thumbs down to the book. Actually, I enjoyed reading it very much. Palmer is a good storyteller, and I enjoyed spending time with Miss Withers and Inspector Piper. There is a background of cheap showbiz in the tale, something Palmer does very well, and I also liked the descriptions of the operations of the New York police. This book is a political landmark in Palmer's fiction as well: in The Green Ace, Palmer pointedly speaks out in favor of racial integration.

The "strangled with a necklace" aspects here give the book a bit of a howdunit aspect, although this is a tiny part of the mystery.

The Green Ace (1950) might be an influence on Truman Capote's novella "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1958). Although the murder victim is never on stage in Palmer's book, she is the much discussed central presence of the novel. The murder victim in The Green Ace is a young show girl, very attractive to a series of men, who has much in common with Capote's Holly Golightly. Both have a similar secret in their past. The Green Ace also contains scenes set at Sing-Sing and Tiffany's, two locales in Capote's novella. (In both works, a woman visits an inmate at the prison. How many works of world literature contain both Sing-Sing and Tiffany's as a location? It must be a vanishingly small number.) There is also a young man from a well to do family, who has to cope with his stuffy family's ideas of marriage in both works (Palmer's is from Philadelphia's Main Line, Capote's is a Brazilian diplomat). A dog is an important character in Palmer, a cat in Capote. Beyond the similarities of the two books, Palmer's work in general has much that might have appealed to Capote. Miss Withers seems quite similar to the proper, strong willed but eccentric maiden ladies that show up in such Capote tales as "The Grass Harp" and "A Christmas Memory". The surreal, spectacular dream sequences in Palmer's work find an echo in similar dream sequences in Capote. There are certainly important differences in the two writers: Palmer is straight, Northern, and cheerily comic in tone, whereas Capote is gay, Southern and Gothic, but both authors have important similarities, as well. While Capote is usually considered a mainstream author, most of his longer works, Other Voices, Other Rooms, "Breakfast At Tiffany's", In Cold Blood, "Handcarved Coffins", have elements of crime or mystery about them.

One of Palmer's poorest short stories, "The Riddle of the Twelve Amethysts" (1945), also uses a fake story, somewhat similar to the approach in The Green Ace. The early sections set forth an intriguing plot, a mysterious situation that seems difficult to explain - and then we learn at the end of the tale that the situation never really existed - and so has no solution! It seems like a cheat, or at least, a disappointment.

Nipped in the Bud

Palmer's Nipped in the Bud (1951) also makes entertaining reading. Partly this is due to the charm and humor of Palmer's storytelling. The book is similar in style to The Green Ace (1950), and the two novels make a diptych. In both, the personalities of Hildegarde Withers and Oscar Piper have reached a full, mature richness. In both works, Hildegarde and the Inspector never stop sleuthing. The continuous detective work is a gratifying reading experience.

Palmer has introduced a new character here, super defense attorney Sam Bordin. Palmer had already started collaborating with Craig Rice on tales that mix Withers' with Rice's attorney sleuth John J. Malone. Bordin is in many ways similar to Malone. Both have never lost a client, both cut legal corners in their clients' defense, both are flamboyant, both have long suffering secretaries and an eye for high living. It is as if Palmer liked the possibilities opened up by the Withers-Malone pairing, and wanted to have a similar character available in his own novels. Palmer also makes the Withers-Bordin combination more Malone like by having Withers and Bordin be old friends.

The appeal of Nipped in the Bud is also due to its plotting, which is unconventional. The reader is never quite sure exactly what sort of story he or she is reading. Is this a murder mystery; a hunt for a missing witness; a tale of legal shenanigans in preparation for a trial? The story could be any of the above, and it is not clear till the end what the real nature of the story is. Palmer's sustained ambiguity keeps the reader guessing. The story continuously oscillates between these poles, sometimes making it look like one of them, sometimes another. It is a very unusual approach. Palmer moves his characters through a strange labyrinth. While the end of the tale does not show puzzle plot brilliance, it does manage to tie up all the ends of the plot. Palmer is oddly helped in this by the breakdown in Golden Age conventions in the 1950's. In the 1930's, most crime books were formal mystery puzzles. By the 1950's, suspense tales were much more common, and it is perfectly plausible that Nipped in the Bud might be a tale of suspense or legal maneuvering.

The treatment of the characters' motivations is also deliberately mystifying. In many mystery stories, the characters all look slightly suspicious. Anyone of them could be the killer. By contrast, Nipped in the Bud is full of actions that demand explanations in terms of stark innocence or guilt. When a witness disappears, is she doing this out of fear? bribery? Does she have a guilty secret herself? An idealistic motive? Has someone deluded her with false ideas? Palmer constantly makes us wonder. These possible motives each move the interpretation of the story in a definitely different direction. There is something discrete about these alternatives, in the mathematical sense of the word. Unlike the guilt or innocence of a character in a conventional novel, which exists along a continuum in shades of gray, the various possible motives in Nipped in the Bud are all sharply separate from each other, like a choice between black and white.

Between the choices the reader is constantly being asked to make about what kind of novel this is, and the different interpretations that are put on the characters' motivations, Palmer has devised a novel that is frequently branching of into different directions. If one were to construct a diagram of the book, the best approach would be a 3D model using a set of Tinkertoys. Each colored stick would represent a different branch of the book's plot, which forks off in all directions making a three dimensional tree.

Nipped in the Bud contains many references to Sherlock Holmes. Withers employs a young Mexican boy Vito as an assistant; the novel points out that he is in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes' "Baker Street Irregulars". Charles B. Child introduced a similar Iraqi character into his Inspector Chafik stories. There is also the young black kid in William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1948). All these young detectives are members of minority races. They are a sign of the early Civil Rights era, and an attempt by their authors to introduce minority sleuths into fiction.

Palmer uses just a few settings for his tale. These include the apartment building where the murder is committed, the TV studio, the main suspect's parents' house; and the hotel where Hildegarde and the young women stay in Tijuana. This allows Palmer to build up the reality of his tale. Most of these spaces seem domestic: they are where people live everyday.

Nipped in the Bud marks the official move of Hildegarde from New York City to Southern California. Part of the book takes place in New York, but most in Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from California. From that point on, most of the Withers short stories and the one completed novel, Cold Poison (1954), have a Southern California setting - although some of the Malone collaborations show Withers visiting the lawyer at his home base of Chicago.

Cold Poison

Cold Poison (1954) is the last Hildegarde Withers novel completed by Palmer in his lifetime. Its puzzle plot is particularly disappointing; Palmer develops an interesting set of background events in his tale, which are dug up by Hildegarde and Inspector Piper with some Anna Katherine Green style sleuthing. Then the solution reveals that all these clues have nothing to do with the mystery! Palmer did this with a number of 1950's mystery works of his. The solution also exposes his weakness in handling motives. On the plus side, the first five chapters of the novel are well written. They are not going anywhere as a puzzle plot, but they remain an interesting torso. The book is set in an animated cartoon film studio of the era. This is similar to the film studio background Palmer employed for The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941).

At the end of Cold Poison, there is a poignant moment when the characters speculate, that because of their age, there might not be anymore Withers adventures. In fact, Cold Poison was to be the last Withers novel Palmer completed, even though he lived another fourteen years. It is unclear what caused this. Did Palmer weary of the characters? Did he become to ill too write? Or did market forces make it impossible to publish more Withers books, with editors deciding the series was "old-fashioned"? Withers stories appeared in a steady stream through 1951, then slowed down to a trickle.

Other Palmer Novels

Before It's Too Late (1950) is a non-series mystery Palmer published under the pseudonym Jay Stewart. The story is unusual for Palmer in that the central figure is a man. Its narrator-hero is an Army officer stationed in Washington D.C., as Palmer himself was during World War II. Like Palmer, the hero is a writer assigned to a desk job in Army Intelligence. (Palmer would return with an even less enthusiastic look at Army officers holding desk jobs in his short story "Autopsy and Eva" (1954).) Also like the much married Palmer, the suspense plot revolves around the hero's romantic search for a woman to marry. Despite this authentic background, the book seems dull. It lacks the vivid show biz characters and much of the humor of the Withers tales; there is little inside information on Washington life, either. It is also more solemn and suspense oriented than most of Palmer's work. It seems like an attempt on Palmer's part to adjust to the new commercial emphasis on suspense fiction after 1945, such as the work of Cornell Woolrich. But he is not as natural with this mode as he is with the true mystery tale. One wonders if the young author Paul Orchard in "The Riddle of the Brass Band" (1934) is also an autobiographical character. Orchard has published a novel called Ace of Vamps, recalling Palmer's own book, Ace of Jades.

Unhappy Hooligan (1956). When I read them years ago, I didn't like either of the Howie Rook novels, Unhappy Hooligan or Rook Takes Knight. Rook himself is likable enough character, but the novels are dull. The apparently authentic circus background of Unhappy Hooligan seems like an extension of the small time vaudeville of The Green Ace. Unhappy Hooligan is full of the fashionable Freudianism of the fifties, and contains some nasty Freudian homophobia - something which returns, briefly, in Rook Takes Knight. I did enjoy Rook's short story appearance in "The Stripteaser and the Private Eye" (1966), however. Rook's collection of newspaper clippings seems autobiographical: Palmer himself collected clippings on a wide variety of subjects, in hopes of finding story inspiration. Palmer's literary idol Conan Doyle also frequently based his Sherlock Holmes stories on news items. Hildegarde Withers also refers to news stories, for example in "The Riddle of the Brass Band" (1934). And suspect Dulcie collects newspaper clippings in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla.

Short Stories: Impossible Crimes and Howdunits

"The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933) has a structure similar to such Palmer novels as Murder On Wheels, The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla and The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan. Only here it is a theft which is the central plot, rather than a murder as in the novels. The theft is an impossible crime, whose mechanism the detective and reader have to figure out, just like the killings in those novels. And there are two subplots: the Alexius one being a Strange Person, and guard Joel Burton being Mysteriously Involved, and linked to the central crime in no less than three ingenious ways throughout this brief tale. Palmer also includes a murder, but it is more a peripheral element in the story, with the theft being central. The theft here involves a full scale impossible disappearance, a classical type of impossible crime. Palmer throws in two whole solutions for it, a model of ingenuity. So the tale includes an impossible central crime, a murder, and two richly developed different kinds of subplots, all in a few short pages!

The early short tales in tend to draw on the technique of the impossible crime. Some, including such gems as "The Riddle of the Brass Band" (1934) and "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (1935), are out and out impossible crime tales. Others use plot ideas reminiscent of the impossible crime to give an alibi to a single character. These stories are not quite "impossible" - any of the other suspects may easily have committed the murder - but the puzzle plot ideas in them could have been used to make a full fledged impossible crime story. Agatha Christie also frequently used such a story architecture. In such stories, it certainly looks impossible that at least one of the main suspects could have done the murder.

"The Riddle of the Hanging Men" (1934) is a minor tale that follows some of the traditions of Murder On Wheels. The hangings recall the main crimes in that book; there is a mild howdunit aspect, trying to figure out the mechanism of the hangings; the second attack follows the same structural plan as the final killing in Murder On Wheels. Both the howdunit and the second attack show mild ingenuity, in their explanations at the tale's end. But the story elements around them are so grim that the tale sinks. These story elements echo John Rhode's The Murders in Praed Street (1928). While this tale is a howdunit, it is not really an impossible crime story: the reader might not know at first how the crimes are committed, but they seem not impossible, but simply a bit mysterious. The explanation of the howdunit also has features in common with the solution to the stabbing howdunit in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla.

There are signs in "The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls" (1934) that Palmer has read Helen Reilly's McKee of Centre Street (1933). The policeman in the gangster movie spoof that opens the tale is named McKee, just as in Reilly's book. And there are scenes in the police radio room at their headquarters in Centre Street, echoing in a small way the superb recreation of the radio room in Reilly's novel. An electrician in charge of stage lighting in a show biz setting is a character in both Palmer's tale, and the opening chapter of Reilly.

"The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls" is on the edges of Palmer's howdunit-Strange Person-Mysteriously Involved paradigm. The central shooting is treated a little bit as a howdunit, and a little bit as a mystery-traditional alibi-and-ballistics situation. It is quite interesting, but partially inside and partially outside of Palmer's howdunit plotting technique. Electrician Roscoe is definitely one of Palmer's Mysteriously Involved characters, with Palmer finding a series of ingenious ways to link him to the killing. At first glance, nobody in the tale seems like a Palmeresque Strange Person. But while no person in the tale fits this pattern, some inanimate objects serving as clues just might. Both the cigar evidence and the silencer function in Palmer's plot somewhat the way his Strange Person characters often do: their behavior as clues is odd, and not traditional, as Palmer makes clear by comparing the cigar evidence in his tale to that in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and there are surprising ultimate revelations about their hidden significance. Admittedly, this alleged similarity to the Strange Person plot is a stretch. Still, these clues are indeed unusual in their basic structural form.

"The Riddle of the Flea Circus" (1933) does not contain any howdunit, with its central murder just a conventional stabbing. So the tale as a whole is not an impossible crime, and does not fit in with the architecture often employed by Palmer's main puzzle plot tales. But it does center around one of Palmer's specialties, the person who is Mysteriously Involved. The mysterious man in the gray suit, who appears in the tale's first sentence, is a classic Palmer Mystery Man. And he keeps having surprising links to the case throughout the story. These links provide most of the tale's ingenuity.

"Green Ice" (1941), a story of theft, involves two borderline-Impossible Disappearances, one of the thief, the other of the title jewel. This delightful story also has plot elements that reflect Strange Person (the painter) and Mysteriously Involved (the Southern Belle) approaches, although they are not 100% pure examples of either. This tale is perhaps most easily found in Ellery Queen's excellent anthology of woman detectives, The Female of the Species.

"The Monkey Murder" (1947) is not much of a story. It has an locked room situation, but one which is largely explained almost immediately in the story. There is a bit of extra explanation at the end, though, which is the story's best feature. A subplot recycles the Southern Belle and policeman from "Green Ice", but not as well.

"Fingerprints Don't Lie" (1947) contains a central impossibility with its plot about fingerprints: not an impossible crime, in the strict sense, but the ability to commit a crime and leave the wrong prints, as the title suggests. It also has a Strange Person subplot, concerning the victim, one that recalls a bit the Derek Laval subplot in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan. Both the impossibility and Strange Person contain some original mystery ideas.

"Autopsy and Eva" (1954) contains a shooting, and it eventually develops into a sort-of howdunit, with strange revelations in the offing about events leading up to the killing. There are no Strange Person subplots in the tale. Two characters are constantly involved in the puzzle, as in the Mysteriously Involved kind of subplot. But while Palmer traditionally uses a whole series of varied devices to get connect up his Mysteriously Involved characters, he adopts a different tactic here. Instead, the characters get involved again and again because of a single connecting link: Miss Withers' advertisement for the missing luggage, a bit of sleuthing that opens the story. The same device is used to connect the police to the investigation (and Withers and Malone), repeatedly, and with considerable ingenuity on Palmer's part. The constant use of one connection, to open new perspectives and links, is ingenious. It recalls a bit the use of the information about the crook being on the train at the start of "Once Upon a Train" (1950), which recurs late in the tale in an ingeniously reversed way. Craig Rice's stories also often feature ingenious links between parts of the action, so one does not want to ascribe all of this to Palmer, necessarily.

"Rift in the Loot" (1955) contains the Impossible Disappearance of a valuable object, like "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" and "Once Upon a Train". As in these earlier tales, the actual murder in the story is not a howdunit. The story also has a well-constructed Strange Person plot. This plot goes through two levels of revelation, unusual for this Palmer tradition, and a mark here of extra ingenuity.

This story mentions that Withers just finished solving the murder in Cold Poison, so it is a continuation of the Withers series even after all the completed novels about Withers have come to an end. Palmer would indeed keep writing an occasional Withers short story over the next dozen years.

"Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers" (1959) contains three mysteries, all more or less howdunits: the forgery, the killing, and an Impossible Disappearance of an object. There are no Strange Person subplots. The story climaxes in Palmer's comic version of a courtroom trial, and is very much his tongue in cheek tribute to Erle Stanley Gardner and his Perry Mason stories. Like those stories, it starts out with legal issues surrounding a crime short of murder (the forgery), gets its heroine up to her neck as chief suspect in a killing, then winds up with the case in court.

Short Stories: Themes

Some of Palmer's short stories, including "Green Ice" (1941), and his first, "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933), deal with ingenious schemes of jewel robbery. These schemes recall the Rogue tradition, although they are worked into full detective stories. They are among Palmer's more satisfying exercises in storytelling. The entertaining "The Blue Fingerprint" (1938) also shares an art world background with "Pearl", as do "The Riddle of the Marble Blade" (1934) and "The Riddle of the Jack of Diamonds". As a trained artist, Palmer is knowledgeable about the technical side of painting and sculpture. The characters in these art stories tend to be expert crafts-people, as well as museum and gallery curators. They are more the worker bees of the art world, as opposed to the intelligentsia floating through such British painting mysteries as Allingham's Death of a Ghost (1934).

Palmer sometimes made excursions into horror in his fiction, as in "The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders" (1934) and "You Bet Your Life" (1957); these two stories share some common imagery, and seem less successful, in my judgment. The finale of "You Bet Your Life" also draws on imagery from "The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls" (1934), which Palmer wrote immediately after "The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders". Gail Cross' striking cover painting on the recent Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (collected 2002) illustrates a scene from "The Riddle of the Blueblood Murders".

Palmer's Craig Rice collaborations, such as "Autopsy and Eva" (1954) and "People Vs. Withers and Malone" (1963), paint an explicitly negative portrait of private eyes, as mainly being cheap crooks and blackmailers. This is similar to their negative depiction by George Harmon Coxe, and by Ellery Queen in "The Ides of Michael Magoon" (1947). All of this forms a contrast to the idolization of private detectives by many mystery writers.

Such Palmer short stories from the mid 1940's as "Snafu Murder" (1945) and "The Riddle of the Tired Bullet" (1948) have a common sociological background, of soldiers returning to New York City, and scams being worked on a largely middle class, even working class, clientele. They evoke an odd, transitional era in American life, and do so with a cynicism and gloom that is in conflict with the official histories of the country that portray the period as one of boundless optimism. The dingy homes and apartments in the tales shows the sheer grunginess in which many ordinary people lived in the cities, and help explain the tremendous motivation to go live in the suburbs that erupted in the post war era. "Snafu" continues Palmer's interest in collaboration in solutions to his puzzle plots. Both stories also continue Palmer's women as golddiggers theme. There is always a certain atmosphere of social realism to Palmer. Even his rich people just have plenty of money: they are not fantasy figures living wild lives of glamorous excess, unlike many escapist tomes, then and now. They are not monsters, but they are generally not too sympathetic, either. Palmer is most definitely not a Marxist: the left wing scriptwriter he delightfully satirizes in Happy Hooligan makes this perfectly clear; it is a type Palmer must have encountered frequently during his long Hollywood career. There are also brief comic encounters with the Communism of the era in "The Riddle of the Marble Blade" (1934) and massive Communist demonstrations in The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937), while a "Red parade" is mentioned as a joke by Piper in Chapter 1 of Murder On Wheels (1932). There is also a more serious treatment of an anarchist in "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl" (1933). Yet there is a certain air of sociological realism that clings to Palmer's writing, one that seems somehow typical of the "proletarian" attitudes of the era of fiction from which he emerged, the 1930's. Palmer wants to entertain his readers, and add color to his stories, but he does this not by escaping into fantasy worlds, but by adding the colorful denizens of show business to his tales.

Film Versions

The Penguin Pool Mystery (1931) made a very good mystery movie in 1932, with the talented (and today little known) director George Archainbaud presiding. Edna May Oliver gave a definitive portrait of Hildegarde Withers, so much so that I now sometimes see her (and hear her) in the novels, especially the more acerbic pre-war ones; Miss Withers became gentler in the books after 1945, although just as aggressive as a sleuth, thank heavens. The unusual sets of this movie sometimes contain ceilings; this innovation is often noticed later in Citizen Kane.

I also think the last two 1930's Withers film mysteries, both based on short stories, and both featuring Zazu Pitts, are a good deal of fun. Palmer manages to mention both Oliver and Zazu Pitts in his Hollywood novel, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan. Although Palmer is on record as not liking what the studio did with "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl", filmed as The Plot Thickens (1936), I thought it was an interesting filming that managed to preserve a lot of the story. It was fascinating to finally see on screen an American mystery I had read. We do not honor our mystery writers the way the English do, and virtually the whole corpus of the American mystery is unfilmed.

Palmer's Screenplays

Palmer wrote screenplays himself during his stint in Hollywood. His script for Bulldog Drummond's Peril (1938) does not show many personal qualities, or even much entertainment value. Based on Sapper's The Third Round (1925), it does develop a small puzzle plot, complete with timetables and questions of identity. Palmer does introduce his signature, a penguin, who briefly gets involved in the first murder. The door to door search on foot also is a frequent theme in Palmer's novels. There are also relentless messages about how the police protect the rich no matter what their behavior or crimes.

Better is Arrest Bulldog Drummond (1939), based on Sapper's The Final Count (1926). Both of these Palmer films were directed by the obscure James Hogan. Sapper's novel reportedly deals with a new poison; Palmer changed it in the film version to a more photogenic death ray. The film has a clever visual idea in that the rays are double, and only have a deadly effect when superimposed; watching the two beams of light attempt to superimpose generates considerable suspense. Somehow this film has a more "Palmer" like feel to it. There is a scene at an Aquarium, but there are no penguins in it. I enjoyed the comic scene where the ray attacks a warehouse full of fireworks, with Algie and Tenny inside. These two comic supporting actors are my favorite characters in the series. (One of the best films in the series has no Palmer involvement at all: Bulldog Drummond in Africa (1938).)

Much better is The Falcon's Brother (1942), the film in which George Sanders as The Falcon passes on the torch as lead in that detective series to Tom Conway; Palmer wrote the script with Craig Rice, no less.

Palmer wrote the original story for Murder in Times Square (1943). It has some personal trademarks: the murders are howdunits, and the setting is the Broadway theater crowd. This entertaining film still does not quite feel like a Palmer prose story - other hands did the dialogue, for instance.

Step by Step

Palmer's last Hollywood film Step by Step (1946), is an entertaining comedy espionage-thriller. Palmer scripted, from George Callahan's story. The tale has some elements in common with Palmer's prose mysteries:

The hero, an ex-Marine played by hulking Lawrence Tierney, bears some resemblance to Miss Withers - in personality, that is. (Miss Withers is frequently compared to horses, while he-man Tierney looks more like a gorilla.) Like Withers, the hero is a snoopy, comic, highly persistent amateur detective, who stumbles over suspicious circumstances, and butts in to investigate where he is not wanted.
He has a comic but intelligent and helpful dog to whom he talks - Hildegarde will soon acquire her poodle Talleyrand in Four Lost Ladies (1949).
The code is hidden in an unusual hiding place (inside the jacket). Palmer had written several mysteries about hard-to-find hidden objects: "The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl", "Once Upon a Train" and "Rift in the Loot". Those prose short stories were puzzle plots, in which the reader had no idea where the object was till the solution of the story. In Step by Step, however, the viewer learns right away where the code manuscript is.
The bad guys do lots of impersonation, reminding us that Miss Withers liked to impersonate people, and so do some of the villains in her stories, notably in "Rift in the Loot" (1955). Impersonation of sorts also turns up in some of Palmer's Strange Person plots.
The way that the senator, his secretary and chauffeur are all echoed and impersonated by spies who are a fake senator, secretary and chauffeur, perhaps recalls the symmetry that plays a role in some of Palmer's stories.
Some of Palmer's mystery puzzle plots revolve around men who wear each other's clothes: The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), "The Riddle of the Double Negative" (1947) and "Once Upon a Train" (1950). In Step by Step, the hero wears the murder victim's jacket. This plays a role in the thriller plot - but it is not the subject of a puzzle plot mystery, unlike Palmer's prose fiction. The heroine also tries on the hero's Marine uniform.
A hammer keeps playing a role in the story, popping up again and again with new and different connections to events. This is a bit like the Palmer characters who are Mysteriously Involved, and who keep getting tied in to the mystery plot in new ways.
The blinking light in the finale recalls the moving beams of light in Arrest Bulldog Drummond. Palmer perhaps thought that "telling a story with light" was a good approach to the film medium. Such use of light is also found in director Edgar G. Ulmer's films.

One wonders if "B-13", part of the spy code, is Palmer's homage to John Dickson Carr's radio play, "Cabin B-13" (1943).

The other members of the creative team also have personal elements in Step by Step. George Callahan's use of electronic bugs by the spies recalls the even more unusual television jukebox in The Shanghai Cobra, for which he also wrote the story.

Director Phil Rosen was reduced in 1946 to low budget B-movies like Step by Step, but during the silent era he had worked on major films like The Young Rajah (1922).

Rosen has Tierney doing much of his early sleuthing clad only in bathing trunks, in scenes that recall Rudolph Valentino in a swim suit rowing for Harvard in The Young Rajah (Rudy wins the Big Race).
Rosen doesn't have a budget for the sort of opulent costumes seen in The Young Rajah, but he does have a large cast of men in every sort of unusual clothes: in addition to his shirtless hero, there is a doctor in whites, a true and false chauffeur, both in uniform, and more leather clad cops than you can shake a stick at. The cops have two different kinds of motorcycle uniforms. Such elaborate uniforms were also a tradition in Columbia Pictures B-Movies, such as the Boston Blackie films of the 1940's.
The retired Vermont sea captain in Step by Step might reflect the fondness Rosen showed for New Englanders in The Young Rajah.