Murder on Wheels (1932) by Stuart Palmer

An ever-popular setting of the traditional detective story is (public) transportation, mostly ships, trains and the occasional plane, but my previous read, Brian Flynn's Murder en Route (1930), centered on a rarely used means of transport – an impossible murder on top of open-decker motor-bus. This reminded me of another, somewhat unusual, transportation mystery novel that has been languishing on my pile for ages. I was surprised to discover how well the plot of that book synced up with Flynn's Murder en Route.

Stuart Palmer's Murder on Wheels (1932) is the second case of arguably the best spinster sleuth of the genre, Miss Hildegarde Withers, who made her first appearance in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931).

Murder on Wheels begins during rush-hour, "on the tag end of a dreary November afternoon," where an open blue Chrysler crashes and became "inextricably entangled" with the fender of a Yellow taxi, but the driver of the Crysler has disappeared from the car-wreck – which was witnessed by the astonished cab-driver. Al Leech tells the police he saw the driver "rise right up out of the seat," into the air, fly down the street backwards! Down the street, the body of a man is found with "a noose of twisted hempen rope" around his neatly broken neck.

Miss Withers and Inspector Oscar Piper were having a quiet cup of tea in a nearby restaurant when the traffic officer started blowing his whistle, which effectively drops this impossible murder, on Fifth Avenue, in their laps.

The victim is eventually identified as a member of an old, once moneyed, New York family, Laurie Stait, whose grandparents used to rate with the Vanderbilts and the Stuyvesants, but now they live on a greatly depreciated income in a "big four-story graystone tomb." Laurie lived their with most of his closest relatives: his twin brother, Lewis, a frightened cousin and a dotty aunt who loves thriller movies, Hubert and Abbie. And living in an impossibly cluttered attic-room, is the 90-year-old grandmother to the twins, Mrs. Strait, whose only companion is a centenarian parrot. A fat, featherless monstrosity with the vocabulary of a piss drunk, foul-mouthed pirate. She lives like a recluse because she got away with murder in the late 1800s.

Naturally, there's a woman involved, Dana Waverly, who was engaged to one of the brothers, but loved the other and she has overprotective brother, Charles – a similar relation/motive arises from a link with a traveling rodeo show. So here we have all the ingredients for one of those typical, top-notch American detective stories from the 1930s. Something along the lines of Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of X (1932) and The American Gun Mystery (1933). But why did it linger on my pile for so long?

Back in 2011, I bought the brand new edition of Murder on Wheels from the now sadly shuttered Rue Morgue Press, but, around the same time, someone posted a discouraging review – chiding the book for its unoriginal and transparent plot. I've to agree that the play on the false-identity trope and the trick for the impossible hanging in the middle of traffic hardly posed a challenge to the reader, but, technically speaking, the overall plot is a masterly done piece of art. 

A plot comprising of many bigger and smaller moving parts that provide some originally handled side-puzzles. Such as what happened to the missing billfold and a surprise wedding, but Palmer saved the best for last. A second, equally bizarre murder is committed very late in the book and the explanation is an inventive, if pulpy, inversion of the locked room mystery with a cruel twist tacked on at the end. Even better is how the circumstances of this second death helped prove one of "the weirdest alibi" Miss Withers and Piper have ever run across.

Yes, Palmer failed to completely pull the wool over the reader's eye, but Murder on Wheels is hardly unoriginal. I even think the apparently cliched plot-thread about identities was cleverly handled, because the solution played out slightly different than you might first expect from the opening chapters and found the hanging-trick interesting – which came with an illustration that was (accidentally) scrambled in the RMP edition. Funnily enough, the trick not only links Murder on Wheels to Flynn's Murder en Route, but Palmer's solution was a variation on the faulty explanation I imagined for the impossible murder on the open-decked bus. I truly had no idea these two books would sync up so nicely.

So, on a whole, I can hardly claim Murder on Wheels is one of Palmer's greatest mystery novels, like The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933), The Green Ace (1950) and Nipped in the Bud (1951), but labeling it as entirely cliched and uninspired is a little unfair – as there are dashes of originality throughout the story. Palmer handled the various plot-threads with great skill, considering this was only his second novel, which all tied nicely together. So the only real problem is that it was not quite good enough to fool any seasoned armchair detective. This is why I can only recommend Murder on Wheels to readers who are either somewhat new to the genre or have already been charmed by Palmer, Miss Withers and Oscar Piper in their later outings. And Murder on Wheels has charm to spare!

Something Funny is Going On Here

"I would rather have a flock of penguins around the place any day than a raven perched on the bust of Pallas above my chamber door."

- Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer's Cold Poison (1954), alternatively known as Exit Laughing, is the penultimate title in the Miss Hildegarde Withers series and the last one to appear in print during his lifetime, which was followed fifteen years later with the posthumous publication of Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (1969) – completed by Fletcher Flora. So you can read this next-to-last novel as the official ending of the series with the posthumous title serving as a curtain call.

In Cold Poison, Miss Withers has retired from her teaching position at Manhattan's Jefferson School and retreated to "the bland, monotonous climate of Southern California" in order to alleviate her asthma. Gratefully, she still has a passion for sticking her nose into other people's business and has a friend back home who recommended her services, as a private snoop, to the big boss of a movie studio.

Ralph Cushak is the studio manager of Miracle-Paradox Studios and his problem concerns the animation department, tucked away in a back corner of the lot known as Cartoon Alley, where several poetic poison-pen letters were delivered to his employees – all were adorned with an illustration of a dead Peter Penguin with "a strangling noose about his throat."

A gross violation of "the unwritten laws of cartoondom" that strictly forbids depictions of snakes, cows with udders, blood and death. So the drawings are a very serious infraction of cartoon etiquette. Oh, and the death threats were not exactly appreciated, either.

On the recommendation of Inspector Oscar Piper of New York City, the studio attracted Miss Hildegarde Withers to discreetly poke around Cartoon Alley.

Formally, the studio hired Miss Withers' poodle, Talleyrand, who acts as a live model for the animators working on a feature-length cartoon, entitled The Circus Poodle, which gives her an excuse to wander around the place as the dog's chaperon – asking all kinds of impertinent questions. Palmer used this angle of the story to provide some padding by giving a detailed, and slightly unnecessary, rundown of the story behind The Circus Poodle, but it helped giving you the idea that Miss Withers was actually at an animation studio. A background practically unique in the genre. Anyway, it doesn't take very long for Miss Withers to stumble upon a body.

The practical joker of the animation studio, Larry Reed, had called in sick around the time the threatening poems were passed around. So Miss Withers decided to pay him a personal visit, but she had to break into his pink-coral, cliffside home with the assistance of a bent hairpin and what she found was the bloated, twisted body of the animator. Something had made him swell up like "a poisoned pup" and the autopsy revealed this something was the garden-variety poison-ivy!

A very unusual kind of poison in murder cases and Miss Withers reaches out to Inspector Piper with the question whether he has ever heard of "a murder being committed with poison-ivy," which he affirmed and the example he knows of currently resided on the pile of New York's unsolved murder cases. So this begs the question whether there's a connection between both poisoning cases and the homicide detective takes the next plane to California.

On a side note, a similar connection between two unusual murder cases brought Piper to Hollywood in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941).

So they begin to dig around together, just like the good old days, but this is the point where the primary weakness of the book begins to manifest itself. Cold Poison has a plot that's on the slender side and buried beneath a barrel full of red herrings, which did no favors to the fair play element of the story. Miss Withers and Piper are constantly kept busy with sorting out all of the false leads, but this sumptuous buffet of red herrings only prevented the reader from having an honest shot at beating the detectives to the solution – as nearly all of the clues turn out to be nothing more than distractions. And this makes it slightly frustrating that the book did not contain illustrations of the visual clues used to identity the poisoner.

At the end of the story, Miss Withers asks all of the suspects to make sketches of the murdered character of Peter Penguin and compares them to original drawings from the poison-pen letters. The thing that betrays the murderer in these drawings is something a regular reader, who's not familiar with the animation business, could still have picked upon. Yes, it would have been a slender clue, but a clue nonetheless and should have been included in the story.

So, you probably assume Cold Poison was an enormous letdown, but not as much as you might think.

Sure, as a detective story, the plot completely underperformed, but, as a fan of the series, it was still an enjoyable read. Granted, the book could have been really great had the clueing been up to scratch, but long-time readers of Palmer will be still able to appreciate this penultimate entry in the Miss Withers series. One that ends on a note suggesting that the series really had come to a close. So the story, in spite of its short comings, is of genuine interest to fans of Palmer, Withers and Piper.

Well, thus ends this poor excuse of a review and wish my brief break from the locked room sub-genre had been on a more positive note, but, hopefully, the next break will turns up a non-impossible classic. 

In the meantime, there are several locked room reviews in the pipeline. I have yet another review of a Kindaichi episode lined up and should return to Case Closed one of these days, which has an impossible crime story involving a certain gentleman thief. I'm also eagerly awaiting the arrival of a short story collection and placed a handful of locked room novels at the top of my TBR-pile, of which two will be re-reads. So you all have some more miracle crimes to look forward to!

Riddle Me This

"My reputation as a meddler had preceded me..."

- Hildegarde Withers (Stuart Palmer's Miss Withers Regrets, 1947)

Stuart Palmer's The Cases of Hildegarde Withers (2012) is an abridged edition of an early compendium of short stories, collecting only five of the eight original stories from The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947), which is the sole drawback of this collection. On the upside, the book still consists of a handful of Palmer's lesser-known, but quality, detective stories about his popular and incomparable series-sleuth, Miss Hildegarde Withers.

Miss Withers is an angular, prim-looking schoolteacher at Manhattan's Jefferson School, where she presides over a third-grade class of hooligans, but she also has an uncanny knack to always be around when a body turns up – earning herself a reputation with the NYPD as a "meddlesome old battleaxe." Fortunately, she also happens to be one "the smartest sleuth" in or "out of uniform."

On the surface, it seems like your standard detective series with an inquisitive, nosy spinster as the protagonist, such as Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple and Patricia Wentworth's Miss Maud Silver, but (IMHO) Palmer and Miss Withers are leagues ahead of their competition. Even John Russell Fearn's wonderful Miss Maria Black is only a distant second in my book.

One of the reasons is the figure of Miss Withers, who's far more convincing character than many of her counterparts, but even more important is that Palmer possessed both a brain and imagination, which he used to construct some clever and imaginative (puzzle) plots – e.g. The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933), The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937) and Nipped in the Bud (1951). But he was equally adept at writing short detective stories (e.g. Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, 2002).

So you can read the content of The Cases of Hildegarde Withers as specimens of Palmer's versatile talent as a mystery writer, because the short stories within this collection range from whodunits, alibi-tricks, a smash-and-grabber and a locked room story of the inverted variety! Let's take a crack at them.

The first story, "The Puzzle of the Scorned Woman" (a.k.a. "The Riddle of the Lady from Dubuque"), was originally published in a December, 1947 publication of New York Sunday News, which cast Miss Withers in the role of "a precautionary measure." Elsie Pender has trouble accepting that the man she loves, Paul Severance, is going to marry another woman and she wants Hermione Lapham to pursued her daughter to blow of her marriage to the plastic surgeon, which is, naturally, out of the question.

However, Pender appears to have gotten her hands on a .38 automatic and Mrs. Lapham is afraid the girl might do something irreversibly stupid. So the head of the Homicide Division, Oscar Piper, turns to the department's gadfly, Miss Withers, because it's difficult for them to act when nothing concrete has happened. But there's not much she can do: Pender is found in Severance's private office with two bullet-holes in the chest and an obviously forced suicide note besides her. Miss Withers solves the case by making an astute observation about her clothes and gloves, which tested negative when they were subjected to a nitrate test. A good, short and simple story with a nifty little twist in the tail.

The next story, "The Riddle of the Yellow Canary," first appeared in a 1934 issue of Mystery and is my personal favorite from this collection!

A music publisher from Tin Pan Alley, Arthur "Art" Reese, has a pesky problem on his hands, named Margie Thorens, who has made it "necessary that she be quietly removed" and has working on a scheme for months – which is put into action with near perfection. Reese slips Margie a poisoned capsule and dictates song lyrics to her while he watches her die, but the clever part is that the song text can be construed as a lyrical suicide note. And as a finishing touch, Reese's leaves her body behind in a room with "a door locked on the inside." The locked room trick is a very simple one, but you rarely get an impossible angle in an inverted mystery. So that was a nice feature.

Inspector Oscar Piper invites Miss Withers to accompany him to the scene, because she always wanted to know how "the police can spot a suicide from a murder," but the bugbear of the police department becomes convinced this suicide is a well-disguised murder. She got a substitute teacher to take over her class and devoted her time to study locks and poisons, but the tale-tell clue came when she discovered the victim had a pet canary. A chirping little creature who proved to be the not so silent witness that strapped Reese to the electric chair. It's an absolute ace of a short story.

The third story of the lot, "A Fingerprint in Cobalt" (a.k.a. "The Riddle of the Blue Fingerprint"), was first published in 1938 in New York Sunday News.

The story opens, uneventfully, at an auction of antiques and the audience show a complete disinterest in a mahogany wardrobe. A heavy beast of burden that took three men to lift onto the platform, but auctioneer is not easily deterred and orders one of his helpers to open to wardrobe to show everyone how much storage space they could own. Someone else had noticed that convenience as well. When the wardrobe is opened, the body of a man comes tumbling out.

Dr. Carl Brotherly was a collector of "Oriental statuettes" and tucked inside his shirt was a postcard-sized photograph of a fingerprint, but why was it found on the body of a murdered collector? Luckily, Miss Withers had a very good reason to be in attendance at the auction and discovers why the police were unable to identity the fingerprints, which points straight to the motive for the murder and the murderer. Another simple, but good, story with a pretty novel idea (the titular fingerprint). I believe the idea, along with the basic premise, could have been developed into a full-length detective novel.

The fourth story, "The Riddle of the Doctor's Double," has a copyright date of 1936, but doesn't appear to have a publishing history prior to 1946 when it was printed in the August issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I can only assume that the story was shelves, or failed to sell, on account of the underperformance of the plot. The premise was promising enough, but the solution was painfully transparent.

Inspector Piper and Miss Withers are present to give aid to an old, feeble and dying man, but his personal physician informs the duo that he believes a very impatient would-be-murderer is helping the old man along to the other world – which is confirmed when, a short while later, the man is murdered in his own bed. However, the person who was admitted to the sick man was his own doctor. Or to be more accurate, the person appeared to be a spitting image of the doctor. And the latter came around to see his patient mere minutes after his double had done the dirty work.

A fantastic premise with all the potential in the world, but everyone with measurable brain activity can see through the charade. A surprisingly poor attempt at a least-likely-suspect story from one of the Greats of the Golden Age. But hey, every short story collection has an obligatory dud or two. Even in a slim volume like this one.

Finally, we get around to "Green Fire" (a.k.a. "The Riddle of the Green Ice"), which was first published in The Chicago Tribune in 1941 and has an unusual kind of problem for Miss Withers: a series of smash-and-grabs of jewelers display windows, but the latest one leaves a police officer dead – shot while he tried to stop the criminal. You would expect such a plot between the pages of a hardboiled crime story, but Miss Withers make some astute observations and clever deductions that provides Inspector Piper with profile of the jewel-snatcher.

Such as the criminal being an egomaniac (the brick was wrapped as a gift with happy birthday on it, because the jeweler's shop was celebrating an anniversary), wanted by the police (desperate enough to shoot his way out of the situation) and he was new to the jewel racket (since he left a valuable green emerald). However, the story has much more to offer as the criminal returns for that "25-carat hunk of green ice," eludes the dragnet, while Miss Withers also has to tango with a mad house-painter and locate the hiding place of the missing emerald.

Sounds confusing? Well, perhaps. However, the story is much clearer than my brief description, but the overall effect is somewhat marred by Palmer's attempt to pack as much plot in twenty-some pages. I think this story warranted a larger page-count. Still, it's nice little story showing what happens when a spinster sleuth, like Miss Withers, makes a wrong turns and ends up on those mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Glad to report she was able to hold her own!

All in all, a well balanced collection of short stories consisting of three good ones, one dud and a minor gem. So not bad. Not bad at all. But the collection and stories were so short that this read was hardly more than an appetizer. Who knows. Maybe I'll pull one of Palmer's unread Miss Withers novels from my shelves as a follow up, but we'll see what the next blog-post will bring.

The Bigger Picture

"To Hollywood, city of screwballs! Drink 'er down."

 - Ellery Queen (Ellery Queen's The Four of Hearts, 1938)

My previous blog-post was a review of John Russell Fearn's Death in Silhouette (1950), which was the last entry in his series about Miss Maria Black, who I compared to Stuart Palmer's Miss Hildegarde Withers and thought reviewing a title from the Withers series would be a nice follow-up. So I airlifted The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941) from the desolate, snow-capped peaks of Mt. To-be-Read.

Palmer was a Hollywood screenwriter and one of my favorite American mystery writers from the genre's Golden Age. A first-rate writer whose bibliography consists of fourteen Miss Withers novels, a handful of short story collections and non-series mysteries as well as numerous credits as a screenwriter – penning scripts for such famous B-movies series Bulldog Drummond and The Falcon. However, the books about his beloved series-character, Miss Withers, usually are top-drawer stuff and counts such classics as The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934) and Nipped in the Bud (1952).

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan is not one of Palmer's masterpieces, but it's a pleasant, mildly humorous detective story with a plot and setting that draws on his background as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Miss Hildegarde Withers is on a six-month sabbatical from her job as a third-grade teacher at Jefferson School and she was looking forward to a Mediterranean cruise, but then Hitler started blitzkrieging across the European continent – which required rescheduling her vacation and she ended up exploring the West Coast of the United States. She's in Hollywood to be precise and an unusual meeting at a restaurant landed her consulting gig.

A talent agent, by the name of Harry Wagman, recognized the schoolteacher from her picture in the newspaper and asked her, accusingly, whether she was "the Murder Lady." He also asked if she was interested in a well-paid job as a technical adviser on a movie about the infamous Lizzie Borden case. One of the big Hollywood producers, Thorwald L. Nincom, plans to make a film epic in technicolor based on the case and Wagman wants to sell her expertise in criminology to the producer, which would net her three-hundred dollars a week. Wagman only wants "a measly ten per cent."

Usually, Miss Withers' presence, as an amateur criminologist, was neither requested or wanted. It always was "in spite of hell and high water" that her "insatiable curiosity had managed to get her into a case," which made her go along with her new agent and meet the famous producer. Even though this was far from a proper murder case. However, she soon finds herself in her familiar role of an unwanted snoop when an inexplicable death occurs on the premises of Mammoth Studio.

Saul Stafford and Virgil Dobie are "one of the highest-paid writing teams in the business," who also garnered a well-earned reputation as the biggest pranksters in Hollywood, but, when Miss Withers meets Stafford, the self-styled comedian suffers from "a mild case of paranoia" - plagued by strange accidents and funny-tasting drinks. Two hours later, she found him sprawled on the floor of his office with a broken neck, next to an overturned chair, with a giant poster on the ceiling hanging from a single thumbtack. It has all the hallmarks of a freak accident, but Miss Withers is convinced she has stumbled across, what she called, an "impossible murder."

Sadly, this is not an impossible crime story and the way in which Palmer handled this angle of the plot is, somewhat, incomprehensible.

There are several broken necks throughout the story and a big deal is made about the apparent impossibility of these deaths. A police-surgeon even mentions he doesn't believe "it physically possible for any person to break another's neck," because "the neck muscles are too strong." So, since there were no signs of a struggle or any noise was heard coming from the office, I began to suspect the victims died by the hangman's drop and the poster on the ceiling and the location of the offices gave me that idea – because, I suppose, offices on a studio plot aren't as solid constructed as a brownstone building.

I figured that, perhaps, panels or parts of the ceiling could be removed and create an improvised trapdoor to drop someone through with a (padded) rope around his neck. This would explain why nobody heard a thing, because the victim was dropped into his office from the floor above and reeled back in, to cut the rope, and then dropped back again in his office – which would also explain the New York victim who was found beneath a window in a soft flower bed. The hangman's drop seemed to be the obvious explanation, but, when the method was revealed, I was baffled that Palmer made such a big deal about the cause of death. Even trying to make it seem like an impossible crime.

It's akin to writing a story in which someone is found murdered inside a locked room and the key to the door was found in the victim's pocket, which is made a focal point of the plot, but then explain it away that the murderer used a spare key. Why bother dressing up the crime as a seemingly impossible murder if that's the angle you're taking? Simply baffling!

On top of that, the murderer was fairly obvious. So this could have easily translated into a rare disappointment in the series, but the book still had some solid, well-done plot-threads and moments. First of all, there's the plot-thread about a mysterious individual, known as Derek or Dick Laval, who appears to have been neck-deep in the New York murder, which was skillfully tied to the overall plot and was a high-note of the book – showing that Palmer could do better than the business about the broken necks. I also loved the touching and sad scenes that placed Miss Withers in genuine danger and had her friend, Inspector Oscar Piper, rushing down from New York to help. I think fans of these two characters will particular appreciate this portion of the story.

Befitting a movie-themed mystery novel, the plot has several fun Easter eggs, nods and winks. At one point in the book, Inspector Piper describes Miss Withers suitcase to a cabdriver and mentions it has labels from London and Mexico City on it, which are subtle references to The Puzzle of the Silver Persian (1935) and The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937). Miss Withers is also mistaken for Edna May Oliver who played her character in the movies based on the earlier books in the series (e.g. The Penguin Pool Murder, 1932).

So, all in all, the overall plot was not one of Palmer's strongest, but the writing and characters were up to his usual standards and made for a fun, fast-paced read. However, I would recommend new readers to start somewhere else and save this one for later, because I think fans of the series will be able to appreciate it more than new readers.

A Sentence of Death

"But suppose, as in the old story about the man who played cards on an ocean liner with the devil, her adversary should choose to lead out the green ace of Hippogriffs?"

- Miss Hildegarde Withers (Stuart Palmer's Miss Withers Regrets, 1947)

The terms "Golden Age Detectives" and "Classic Mysteries" are inextricably linked to the British Isles, but, over the years, I have cultivated a strong affinity for their American contemporaries – which includes such luminaries as Ellery Queen, Kelley Roos, Clyde B. Clason, Helen McCloy, Craig Rice and Rex Stout. One of my personal favorites from this place and period in time is the funny and clever Stuart Palmer.

Stuart Palmer was a screenwriter and novelist who wrote a host of mysteries. A lion's share of them featured that "meddlesome old battleaxe," Miss Hildegarde Withers, who made her first appearance in The Penguin Pool Murder (1931) – followed by thirteen additional novels and a handful of short collections. Some of my favorites from in this series are The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934), Nipped in the Bud (1952) and Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), but, inexplicably, I had not returned to this series for many years. A situation that could no longer stand!

So I picked up a copy of The Green Ace (1950). It's one of the last books in the series, only four more would follow over a period of twenty years, and has a plot modeled around a race-against-the-clock type gimmick.

On an early, barmy Saturday morning, two police officers witness how a speeding car ignores a stop-signal and smashes into a parked delivery truck. Routinely, a ticket, an accident report and a stern warning would've been enough to delegate this incident to the dustbin of history, but one of the officers notices that "there was something crammed against the back seat" covered with "an old army blanket" – which obscured the naked body of dead woman. The driver of the car, Andrew "Andy" Rowan, is "a former hack newspaperman turned press-agent" and the "big glamazon" of a body, Midge Harrington, was his client and an aspiring Miss America.

Rowan is held responsible for her murder and was unable to convince the authorities of his innocence. As a consequence, he’s tried, convicted and scheduled for execution within a year of his arrest. However, this was only the prelude of the story. A story that begins when Rowan is in the death-house and the clock begins to tick away the final days of his life.

Somehow, the condemned man "managed to hang onto $3500" and drafted a will, in which he left the three-and-a-half grand to Inspector Oscar Piper. There is, of course, a catch: Piper has to use the money "to make a full and impartial investigation of the murder for which he is being unjustly executed." Inspector Piper is wary that the press will get wind of this "screwball will," but his old friend, Miss Hildegarde Withers, reminds him there's time left before Rowan "walks that long last mile through the little green door to the hot-sit" and does what she does best – sticking her nose where it has no business of being.

Quickly, it becomes apparent what sets the ex-school teacher apart from other amateur detectives: Hildegarde Withers is not content with merely woolgathering or observing from an armchair. Withers prefers to actively pursue the truth, which has varying degrees of success and her actions often drive the plot itself forward. Her actions also tend to lend a comedic touch to the stories. For example, The Green Ace has her unsuccessfully impersonating the condemned man's wife and is arrested for shoplifting, but her shenanigans during an attempted identifications of a suspect with an "extremely prominent nose" put a strain on the friendship between her and Piper. So it's not all fun and games.

However, besides stumbling from one situation into another, making "a shot in the dark" and "play hunches," Withers is an ardent Sherlockian. She learned from the greatest of all detectives and applied his methods, of which the most successful one is a network of grownup-counterparts of the Bakerstreet Irregulars. As an ex-school teacher, "generations of grubby urchins had passed through her tutelage" and "had risen to positions of importance and influence," which she could call up on "just as Sherlock Holmes did on his Irregulars."

Well, it's this combination of delightfully busy leg-work and recognizable Sherlockian wisdome ("the curious incident of the lipstick in the nighttime") that leads Withers to the logical explanation of a case that involves a deadly necklace, mysterious phone calls, hysterical laughter and a murdered medium – who was brained with her crystal ball. The most impressive aspect of the plot was how the reader's attention was diverted away from the obvious suspect and how a clichéd-ending was avoided. A gross miscarriage of justice was avoided, but not in the way you'd probably expect.

So Palmer managed to do something original this plot-device and therefore warrants a read, but, if you're new to the series, I would recommend getting acquainted with characters first in their previous outings.

On a final note, I have to point out how of a 1950s novel The Green Ace is, which includes a number of references to the dawning "days of television." Notably, there's a description of the apprehension of a suspect, as "newsreel cameras whirred” and "a man with a portable microphone ran forward," but "say something for the television audience" was met with a response that turned Channel Four "dark all over the nation" – not soon enough "to prevent the kiddies from learning some new words." There are also references to the H-Bomb, flying saucers and "under-the-counter Billie Holiday numbers." I found it interesting how these (now historical) references hinted at the changes in pop-culture and it's only natural that Palmer, as a writer for Hollywood, was aware of them and they found their way into his work.

Well, that was it for this review and now comes the excruciating process of deciding what to devour next. A locked room mystery? The Three Investigators? Something hardboiled? A historical detective? Maybe finally wrote that blog-post about what makes a good impossible crime? Choices, choices, choices!   

Playing the Fool

"We have found that squirting water into a real clown's mouth until he drowns is more fun, and of benefit to society, but that's another story."

- Todd Robbins (The Modern Con Man: How to Get Something for Nothing, 2008) 

Stuart Palmer was a Golden Age luminary and arguably one of the brightest adherents of the American wing of the Intuitionist School, which included such mystery writers as S.S. van Dine, Ellery Queen, Kelley Roos and Rex Stout.

The Penguin Pool Murder (1931) introduced a beloved character among connoisseurs of murder, Miss Hildegarde Withers, who's a schoolteacher-turned-detective and assisted the police in piecing together The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934) and The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937) – among other noteworthy endeavors in crime-detection by "that meddlesome old battleaxe." However, for this review, I will be looking at the first book from a short-lived series Palmer wrote in the 1950-and 60s.

Howie Rook is Palmer's second-string character and headlined only two novels, published more than a decade apart, of which Unhappy Hooligan (1956) was the first. The story opens when a large tomcat, named Satanas, enters the apartment of John MacFarley through the only open window, which is left slightly ajar and accessible by a narrow ledge only a cat or human fly can tip-toe on. MacFarley is curiously dressed in black-tie and dinner jacket, in combination with a face full of clown paint and a bullet hole in the chest.

"Locked room mysteries are usually for fiction and the pen of John Dickson Carr," Rook observes, but he could show Police Chief Parkman clippings from his news papers of genuine examples of impossible crimes escaping from the printed pages. Unfortunately, the reference to the "Pincus affair in New York City's Bronx," in which an inoffensive tailor "had died in a locked and bolted room from having a handkerchief jammed down his throat," appears to be fictional. Last year, I posted several, real-life examples of actual locked room mysteries: Part I, II, III, IV and V. Anyway, back to the review.

MacFarley was a circus enthusiast who had spend the last days of his life as an honorary clown, traveling around with the Big Top, but didn't make many friends among the regular performers when he began to fool around in earnest - which may have made him an enemy that left traces of elephant dung and sawdust in the apartment. Rook has to go undercover at the circus as a retired business man and don the grease paint as he pokes around the motley crew of performers. Palmer really did an excellent job at drawing an array of unusual, but real enough, characters from the cast of vaudeville personalities and depicting their life as traveling artists.

This shoves the locked room aspect of the story more to the background, but the circus material is really the best part of the book. It was very reminiscent of Case with Four Clown (1939) by Leo Bruce, in which Sgt. Beef has practically joined the circus. Rook takes his role as a professional rather than a dilettante, but it's quite enjoyable to have your detective lumbering around as a mute clown, having a close shave with a throwing-knife and duty-bound to distract the audience after a thrilling moment in the big top of the tent – while figuring out a way a murderer could've entered the locked and bolted apartment. The job is made all the more difficult when the widow and daughter keep throwing suspicion on each other.

Unhappy Hooligan is a lively written, reasonably plotted mystery novel, enhanced by a well-drawn circus background and characters, but the overall plot did not measure up to the best from the Miss Withers series (e.g. Nipped in the Bud, 1951). The explanation for the locked room was carnie, but to be expected, and I was glad to see that Poe's "monkey wrench" was used as an obvious red herring. I really should just stop whining about these disappointing locked room mysteries and just write one myself... you know... one of these days...

So, all in all, not the best of mystery novels, but also far from the worst. I've just read better detective stories by Palmer. If you're not familiar with his work yet, I can highly recommend People vs. Withers and Malone (1963; co-authored with Craig Rice) and Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002). If you like short detective stories, you'll love these!

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you"

"There are many doors to Fantasia, my boy. There are other such magic books. A lot of people read them without noticing. It all depends on who gets his hands on such books."

- Mr. Coreander, The Never-Ending Story (1979). 

I always had a weakness for crossovers. It's difficult to explain where this fascination came from, but there's something positively thrilling about watching two different universes collide with one another and merge into one – and a character from one book acknowledging a character from another book, as an actual person, is enough to send a tingling down my spine. It's for this reason that I enjoy Rex Stout's non-series detectives as much as the ones he wrote featuring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. They are jam-packed with places and secondary characters that make it very clear they all inhabit the same universe, but, to my great sorrow, Wolfe, Fox and Hicks were never destined to cross paths.

So you can imagine my glee when, a few years ago, I discovered that Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice had collaborated on a bunch of short stories, collected in The People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), in which their series detectives actually worked together on half a dozen cases (was there a god, after all?)!

But as great and fun as the stories were, and the experience of reading them, they somewhat pale in comparison to what happened after I turned over the final page. This is not a book review, but an account of the night I stepped through one of the Fantasia's hidden doors and met Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone face-to-face. ;-)  

The Dream

I swear, they're sneaking up on me!

I vividly remember the night that my conscious mind dislodged itself from my sleep-wrapped brain, entered an alternate dimension, and walked into a dimly-lit room, dressed sharply like a 1930s gumshoe (think Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin, but I felt more like Sam Tyler at that moment), and there, on the floor, was the body of a man. Near him lay a revolver that hadn't given up smoking yet.

Well, here was a unique opportunity to prove my prowess as the cerebral detective I always fancy myself to be, and went down on all four to methodically study the remains and the murder weapon, when, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Hildegard Withers and John J. Malone burst onto the crime-scene. They grabbed me, each under one of my arms, and started dragging me out of the room. The police were on there way, they told me, to arrest me for this murder, but rest assured, they would prove me to be innocent of this dirty deed – and all this time I was kicking and screaming that I didn't want their help, because they always make things worse than they already are.

Then the dream cuts to a bizarre, almost surrealistic car chase with a few dozen patrol cars. I'm locked in the trunk by the dynamic duo, banging and screaming to be let out, and lurched over the steering wheel (with a gleam of madness in her eyes) is Hildegard Withers – while Malone hangs out of the side window, with an half empty bottle of whiskey, hollering a song about pretty girls and booze.

And then I woke up... but was it all a dream? Well, I can tell you it was one of the most realistic and lifelike ones I ever had in my life. Withers and Malone weren't vague, dreamy images but actual, three-dimensional human beings. I remember the pressure of their grip on my arms. Heck, I even smelled the booze on Malone's breath!

This means one of the following things: a) my brain couldn't fully comprehend that I had just read an actual GAD-crossover, and as a result I was having a full-sensory hallucination b) the stories were so epic that they ripped a hole in the time-space continuum and allowed me to travel to a parallel universe were detective stories are the reality c) for a brief moment, my sleep induced mind figured out how to open one of the doors leading to Fantasia.

But what do regular visitors who haunt this blog think?