People vs. Withers and Malone (1963) by Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice

You know, I love a good detective trope as much as the next person and my enduring, tediously documented obsession with the locked room mystery has been called a "cause for concern," but they say that because they don't realize there's a trope even more potent than the impossible crime – a trope rarer than musgravite. The classic of literary guilty pleasures, the crossover. While not as rare in other fields of fiction, there have been very few genuine crossovers in detective fiction over its nearly two-hundred year run.

H.C. Bailey allowed his two series detectives, Reggie Fortune and Joshua Clunk, to make occasional cameos in each others cases, but never truly worked with, or against, each other. A panel of famous detective characters appear in Brian Flynn's The Case of the Painted Ladies (1940) to help out Anthony Bathurst, but their appearance is more in the way of a cameo than a crossover. Same goes for William Clerihew from H. Warner Allen's Mr. Clerihew, Wine Merchant (1933) briefly popping up in E.C. Bentley's Trent's Own Case (1936) to advise Philip Trent. So one of the first true and truly effective crossovers is probably Patrick Quentin's Black Widow (1952) pitting the innocently framed Peter Duluth against the tenacious Lt. Trant from Death and the Maiden (1939).

After the 1950s, Edward D. Hoch pooled some of his many series detectives on special occasions. Dr. Sam Hawthorne meets Ben Snow in "The Problem of the Haunted Tepee" (1990) and Captain Leopold crosses paths with Nick Velvet in "The Theft of Leopold's Badge" (1991). A writer who made serious work of crossovers in the (modern) crime-and detective story is Bill Pronzini. Pronzini's Nameless Detective has teamed up with Marcia Muller's Sharon McComb in Double (1984) and the short story "Cache and Carry" (1988), but their best crossover is Beyond the Grave (1986) in which Elena Oliverez from Muller's The Tree of Death (1983) comes across a historical mystery from 1894 involving Carpenter and Quincannon – the turn-of-the-century San Francisco gumshoes. Even before that, Pronzini's Nameless Detective found himself working alongside Collin Wilcox's Lt. Frank Hastings (Twospot, 1978). There are, of course, the missed opportunities. Carter Dickson and John Rhode's Fatal Decent (1939) not being a crossover between H.M. and Dr. Priestley or Rex Stout and Ian Fleming discussing the idea of James Bond, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin having a meetup that never happened ("Bond would have gotten all the girls").

So, while there have been few real crossovers, those few have been generally good, but even then, they're hardly known as crossover classics. In fact, the only work really known and celebrated for its quality as a crossover is a collection of half a dozen short stories, Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice's People vs. Withers and Malone (1963).

Stuart Palmer and "Craig Rice," a penname of Georgiana Randolph, were not only friends, but two of the brightest lights of the American detective story. Palmer debuted Miss Hildegarde Withers, "schoolteacher by profession and meddlesome old snoop by avocation," who made her first appearance in The Penguin Pool Murder (1932) giving the whole concept of spinster sleuth a bit more bite – which made her my favorite. Rice, the Queen of the Screwball Mystery, was said to have been "virtually the only woman writer of the distinctively American type of mystery, the tough, hard-boiled school that combines hard drink, hilarity, and homicide." She created my favorite shady lawyer, John J. Malone, who always right in the middle of some boozy, madcap antics, heavy drinking and solving crimes ("...usually by pure accident while chasing through saloons after some young woman..."). I take these two over Miss Marple and Perry Mason anytime!

Nobody remembers, exactly, who came up with the idea to pair the prim spinsters with the messy Chicago attorney. Rice thought it was Palmer. Palmer believed it was the editor "Ellery Queen." Queen named Palmer. Whoever came up with the idea, Palmer and Rice collaborated through correspondence on four stories that appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but the last two stories were posthumous collaborations published after Rice's untimely death in 1957. Palmer wrote and parsed the last two stories together from "some Craigean scrap or Ricean fragment" in their letters and notes. Their partnership proved to be what you want and hope a crossover to be (i.e. not just a gimmick). While in a way different mystery writers with opposite characters as detectives, Palmer and Rice's style and plotting techniques proved to be far from incompatible with Malone and Withers playing off each other like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin at their best.

I first read this collection, years ago, in a Dutch translation (badly) titled Een advocaat en kwade zaken (A Lawyer and an Evil Business), but always wanted to reread it in English. So why not take a look at these six madcap capers during these final days of the year.

"Once Upon a Train," originally titled "Loco Motive," first appeared in the October, 1950, issue of EQMM and finds John J. Malone celebrating the "miraculous acquittal" of his client, Stephen Larsen. A machine politician who had been caught with his hand in the municipal till and Malone is now waiting for him to settle his much needed fee ("...two months' back office rent..."), but Larsen has boarded the Super-Century for New York ("next stop Paris or Rio"). Malone is in hot pursuit and boards the train, however, there's no trace of Larsen or the beautiful redhead he spotted. He meets someone else, a tall, angular woman "who somehow suggested a fairly well-dressed scarecrow" with a floral hat resembling "a well-kept grave," Miss Hildegarde Withers – where off to the races! Their first meeting aboard the Super-Century train is a crossover worthy event that keeps getting better when a body turns up in Miss Withers' compartment. Malone and Miss Withers are the wrong detectives to try such a stunt on, because they immediately start tempering with evidence by moving the body back and forth between their compartments to delay discovery. Not only is "Once Upon a Train" a very entertaining story, putting two detectives from different series on the same page, but the plot is solid with a solution answering the question why the body was undressed and where the money (including Malone's fee) was hidden on the train. So a fantastic story all around!

"Cherchez la Frame" was originally published in the June, 1951, issue of EQMM and brings Malone and his secretary, Maggie, to Beverley Hills, California, on a discreet assignment. Joe Vastrelli hired Malone to track down his estranged ex-wife, Nina, who had abandoned him to become an actress and wanted to know if she wanted him back. Malone, "a pushover for a sentimental story," accepted and took the opportunity to meet back up with Miss Withers, but Maggie has to keep his date and confides in Miss Withers her worry Malone is getting himself into trouble. Not without a reason. Malone finds Nina's body in the bedroom of his bungalow hotel with his own, distinctively hand painted, necktie knotted tightly around her neck. Like I said before, Malone and Withers are the wrong detectives to try a frame job on. This time, the killer did a better job than the previous murderer ("a lovely, hand-painted frame") and it looks like Malone is in serious trouble towards the end ("...I'm licked"). That being said, Malone and Withers carry this story as the murderer, motive and method are obvious from the start. So not as good as the first, but still a thoroughly entertaining story mixing mayhem with murder.

"Autopsy and Eva" was first published in the August, 1954, issue of EQMM and opens with Malone ready to embark for Honolulu on holiday, "just collected a fat fee," but Miss Withers drops by to spoil the fun – announcing "we're thoroughly mixed up in another murder case." Miss Withers goes on to explain about the Ryan murder case in which an army colonel returning from Korea was found killed in his bedroom. So it's assumed the returning Ryan found his wife, Eva, together with her loves, got overpowered and shot with his own service pistol. Miss Withers has her doubts and done some sleuthing on herself, which seems to have borne fruit. Now she wants Malone to present when hearing the people who responded on her ad requesting information. Of course, one of them practically ends up dead on Malone's doorstep. Miss Withers casually informs Malone she's been harboring the fugitive Eva Ryan in her spare bedroom for the past four days. So this another entertaining outing for the two disaster creating murder magnets, but, once again, Malone and Withers carry the story.

"Rift in the Loot," originally published in the April, 1955, issue of EQMM, is not a detective story, but one of those thriller-ish gangster stories from the pulp magazine of previous decades. Malone and Withers get roped in to retrieve the hidden loot from a deadly robbery, which appears to be easy enough, but complications and corpses abound. Fun but minor stuff.

"Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers," first published in the February, 1959, issue of EQMM, is the first, of two, Withers and Malone stories Palmer wrote following the Rice's untimely death in 1957. Malone again finds himself in deeper hole than the previous time. Nancy Jorgens had a secret relationship with Paul Bedford, of the canned-beef Bedfords, who got her pregnant and told her to go see some shady doctor. So she turned to Malone to bring a paternity suit against Bedford, but Bedford fought back veraciously and brought in a whole parade of men who "swore they had enjoyed the favors of my fair client." Fortunately, this resulted in a hung jury, but, while Malone was moving for a new trial, Nancy got arrested for forging Paul Bedford's name a $25,000 check. She claims the check came in the mail and thought it legit, but the D.A. is out for blood. And even Malone is the target. Even worse, Nancy skipped town and Malone turns Miss Withers telling her, "we've got to find Bedford before Nancy finds him." So, more or less, standard fare for this crossover series, but the ending elevates it a bit closer to the first story. Malone finds himself in court as a fellow conspirator, but uses his Perry Mason-like courtroom theatrics and wizardry to conclude the case during their bail hearing. These last two stories are a bit longer than the first four, but Palmer put them to good use here!

"Withers and Malone, Crime-Busters," originally published in the November, 1963, issue of EQMM, finds Malone in an even more trouble than the last time. Malone always boasts that he never lost a client, but his latest client was sentenced to death. Walter "Junior" Coleman, playboy socialite, stood accused of killing his secret girlfriend, Jeanine, outside Le Jazz Hot with his car and received a life sentence at the first trial. Malone got him a new trial and a death sentence, but Malone himself is in potential legal trouble and potentially faces bribery charges. That's not even considering the devastating prize-tag attached to it, a bribed witness who has bailed and Junior already sitting in the condemned cell – entirely resigned to his fate. And a potential clue, or lead, lost in the foggy mist of a legendary hangover. Miss Withers came as soon as she heard the bad news ("welcome to the wake"), but they first dig themselves even deeper into trouble before they start digging themselves out again. A highlight of the story is when Malone ends up in the hospital, one leg raised high in traction, and Miss Withers has to disguise herself as a nurse to speak with him. So another fun, incredibly entertaining story to close out the story, marred only by a rather obvious murderer spoiling an interesting take on an age-old motive with legal complications.

I think "Withers and Malone, Brain-Stormers" and "Withers and Malone, Crime-Busters" probably would have made for a great novel and punctuation to the collaboration had they been merged together. Two cases simultaneously exploding in Malone's face with Miss Withers coming to the rescue (Welcome to the Wake would have been a good title).

So, all in all, Palmer and Rice's People vs. Withers and Malone is best described as the detective story's equivalent of an amusement park ride and probably best read as an episodic novel rather than a short story collection. I think only "Once Upon a Train" can stand on its own as a detective story with the first meeting between the two Malone and Withers making it a very special short story indeed. Malone and Withers carry the remaining stories from start to finish and they're the reason to read this unique team up between two detectives from different writers. There you have my rare recommendations purely on the strength of character. A Christmas miracle only a few days late!

Notes for the curious: People vs. Withers and Malone is not the only crossover in Palmer and Rice's work, which even extends to the detective fiction by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green. Firstly, Malone has an off-page cameo in Palmer's Miss Withers Regrets (1947) and briefly appears in the 1946 episode "The Double Diamond" from Boucher and Green's radio serial The Casebook of Gregory Hood. Gregory Hood is also linked to the Sister Ursula series through the Derringer Society from Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (1942) and the Gregory Hood episode "The Derringer Society" (1946). Note that the Thrilling Detective Website mentions an untitled, 1948 crossover episode in which Hood appears alongside Sam Spade from the radio show The Adventures of Sam Spade. I don't remember if Fergus O'Breen or Nick Noble were ever alluded to/made cameos in the Hood or Sister Ursula series, but their inclusion would be the finishing touch to this extended pocket universe of detectives.

Anyway, I don't know if this going to be the last one of the year or one more gets squeezed in, but if this is the last one, I wish you all a happy new year and best wishes for 2026!

Locked and Loaded, Part 6: A Selection of Short Impossible Crime and Locked Room Mystery Stories

For some reason, I thought the previous "Locked and Loaded" was posted earlier this year, somewhere around March, but “Locked and Loaded, Part 5” was posted last November and forgetting to do another one of these wasn't for a lack of choice – more a lack of availability of some of the choosier items. There are still of a ton of rarely reprinted, mostly uncollected short stories eluding me. Stories such as Brandon Fleming's "The Case of the Armour Figure" (1922), Arlton Eadie's "The Clue from Mars" (1924), Vincent Cornier's "The Dust of Lions" (1933) and Victor Maxwell's "The Siege at 2242" (1933).

Despite some elusive obscurities and rarities, I think I hoarded an interesting medley of short stories over these half dozen "Locked and Loaded" reviews covering a period of 118 years. Not all masterpieces or outright classics, but a diverse, imaginative lot of short stories, published between 1905 and 2023, taking on the locked room and impossible crime problem in their own way. Surprisingly few duds and stinkers considering the randomness when raking one of these patchy reviews together. Let's see if I can keep up this hot streak of moderate success.

B. Fletcher Robinson's "The Vanished Billionaire" first appeared in the February, 1905, issue of the American edition of Pearson's Magazine, which is a slightly altered version of "The Vanished Millionaire" from Robinson's The Chronicles of Addington Peace (1905). For some reason, the name of Robinson's detective was changed from Addington Peace to Inspector Hartley, of Scotland Yard, for the American publications among other minor alterations – like change from millionaire to billionaire. Even though the first modern-day billionaires wouldn't come around until the late 1910s, early '20s. I should also note Robinson collaborated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and foolishly declined to be credited as a co-author. It has been suggested had he been credited as not only the co-author of The Hound of the Baskervilles, but as the person who helped to bring Sherlock Holmes back, Robinson's own detective fiction would not been so thoroughly forgotten today. Would they be remembered on their own merit or riding the coattails of an inverness cape? Time to find out!

Silas J. Ford, billionaire of the title, "established a business reputation in America that had made him a celebrity in England" and, according to the tradition of the American self-made man, he kept his name in the papers ("...full of praise and blame, of puffs and denunciations"). Ford gave the newspaper something to write about when he disappeared on dark, snowy night in December under seemingly impossible circumstances. During the night, Ford had left his bed to venture outside and a trail of his distinct boot prints that ended in the middle of a field of smooth, unbroken snow twenty feet from the wall surrounding the property ("apparently he had stepped into space")! Inspector Hartley is dispatched to the scene of the disappearance and foreshadows that this case is going to be more about the why than the how. The core plot and motive for why Ford had to disappear wasn't bad, not for a detective story from 1905, but explanation for the no-footprints is dumb even for 1905. I would have taken one of the routine solutions over (SPOILER/ROT13) “ur gvrq ba gur obbgf va erirefr snfuvba” naq gura ohatyrq vg, juvpu yrsg oruvaq gur “fgenatr rivqrapr.” Lbh nyzbfg qrfreir gb or sybttrq qbja n frperg cnffntr sbe rira qnevat gb fhttrfg fhpu n fbyhgvba. A shame as the presentation of the no-footprints was very well done for the time and one of the earliest no-footprints impossible crimes on record. So it's also one of those rare duds in this series of blog-posts, judged solely on its merits as an impossible crime story.

Stuart Palmer's "The Monkey Murder," originally published in the January, 1947, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, has to be one of the oddest, most bizarre short stories in the Miss Hildegarde Withers series. Halfway between an inverted detective story and a very bizarre locked room murder. Inspector Oscar Piper tells Miss Withers about George Wayland, "the wife-strangler, blast him," whom he believes got away with murdering his wife by dressing her death up with "a phony religious-cult background." Janet Wayland body was found in the back bedroom lying tied, hand and foot, on a sort of sacrificial altar overlooked by the idol of big, ugly monkey god – whose tail was tightened around her throat. The whole scene, behind a bolted door, looked like "looked like the nightmare of a Hollywood set-designer for B-budget horror pictures." Piper has a pretty good idea how the bolted door was worked, but unable to get evidence that sticks. So they had to let Wayland go.

There's something else about the technically unsolved case bothering Piper. Wayland is, beside the spousal murder, the personification of "Mister Average American" and "the average citizen commits the average murder." So where did the plain, unimaginative Wayland got the idea to strangle Janet with the tail of the tail of an East-Indian monkey-god and stage it as an outlandish cult killing ("that, plus the locked-room thing..."). An out-of-character murder. Miss Withers decides to take a crack at the case herself, however, she gets exactly the same result as the New York police: Wayland laughing in her face. So she's forced to set a baited, legally dubious trap proving Wayland is a hall of fame idiot after all. Palmer neatly weaved several plot-threads, big and small, together into this very well-done short story. And while a fairly minor locked room mystery, Miss Withers' explanation added a small twist to the locked room-trick with a detail Piper had overlooked. Miss Withers, Inspector Piper and Palmer seldom disappoint and "The Monkey Murder" is no exception.

Bill Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop," originally published in the July, 1973, issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, appears to be one of Pronzini's least known, overlooked short impossible crime stories – mentioned in neither Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) nor Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). The story is both good and amusing. Detective-Sergeant Renzo Di Lucca, "a dedicated, patient and observant cop," who always gets paired with rookies. Something he sees as a chore as "there were problems with every rookie." The problem with his latest assignment, Tim Corcoran, is that he has too much imagination that turned every routine case into "puzzles of magnitude." So when they're called to the scene of a murder that has many of the tropes from classic detective fiction, Corcoran's imagination begins to run wild.

Simon Warren is shot and fatally wounded behind the locked door of his private library. When the door is broken down, Warren's whispers to his butler the cryptic words, "pick up sticks," before dying. That and the murder weapon apparently evaporated alongside the murderer from the locked library. Corcoran is ecstatic that he not only gets to investigate a real locked room murder, but a locked room with a dying message tucked inside. Di Lucca constantly has to serve as an anchor for his rookie assignment, which came down to shooting down Corcoran's false-solutions. I really liked Corcoran's false-solution, wrong as it may be, because it showed more imagination than the old dodge the murder actually used. However, everything from the shooting, vanished gun, dying message and locked room-trick were skillfully tied together to provide an overall satisfying short story. So it's odd "The Methodical Cop" is not better known (at least among his own impossible crime work) even if its a classic case of the false-solution outshining the correct answer.

Note for the curious: Pronzini reworked the plot of "The Methodical Cop" into the Carpenter & Quincannon short story "Pick Up Sticks" (2021), which was combined with the short story "Quincannon in Paradise" (2005) and reworked into the final, novel-length Carpenter & Quincannon The Paradise Affair (2021).

Bill Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have," originally written for the anthology Partners in Crime (1994), is yet another minor affair when it comes to the miracle problem, but a fun enough short story for fans of Ellery Queen. Bo Wagner and Janice Langtry are the co-authors of the Sam Fernando mysteries, "one of the most promising series of detective novels the 1950s had yet seen," which he plots and she writes. They specialize in locked room murders and other impossible crimes under every imaginable circumstance and variation. So when one of their friends and avid collector of detective novels is shot in his library, the police asks their help as authorities on storybook murders and locked room-tricks. Because every exit from the house was either locked, bolted or under observation ("...like something from one of our books"). So a fun enough short story for its character rather than its plot which would have been perfect for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020) anthologies.

So, yeah, the selection of the short stories, so far, is fairly solid, story-and character-wise, but not terribly inspiring when it comes to their locked room and impossible crime plots and tricks. Get ready for a surprise, because the best one of the lot comes from a writer of techno-thrillers!

James H. Cobb's "Over the Edge," originally printed in the July, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, stars Kevin Pulaski, "four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month deputy sheriff," who debuted in the novel West on 66 (1999) – appeared in a handful of short stories. This story begins with Pulaski taking his lover, Princess, along to meet a teenage informant on a lookout moonlighting as a daytime lover's lane. So they decide to stick around, fool around and enjoy what looks like lovers' tiff in another car ("all we needed was a bag of popcorn"). When the man drives away, the woman stays behind in her own car and she stays put. They ignore her, however, Pulaski becomes suspicious after a while and wants to see if everything is right. At that the moment, the woman "slowly and deliberately drove her car off the edge of the overlook" into the canyon below. The police believe it was a clear case of suicide, but Pulaski believes it was murder and they wish the deputy good luck with his investigation.

There's no mystery about who engineered her murder, but since the man had driven away and secured an alibi, before she drove over the edge, Pulaski is faced with an impossible crime. This time, the trick is not based on an old locked room dodge, but entirely original and not impossible to figure out. Pulaski even thanks the murderer, "in a world of plain old day-in day-out mayhem, this is the first time I've ever worked one of these fancy, set-up killings like Ellery Queen writes about." Although I have come to associate these kind of inverted howdunits with those type of tricks with Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series. Needless to say, I enjoyed Cobb's "Over the Edge" and is the standout here. A candidate to be included on the future revision of my locked room/impossible crime lineup of favorites.

Finally, Maria Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye," published in the December, 2007, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has only two distinguishing features. Firstly, the staging of an impossible strangling of an elderly, wealthy American tourist traveling alone in a glass capsule on the London Eye. Secondly, it was published in the same year as Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery (2007). But other than that, the story simply redresses an old locked room-trick in modern garb. It's not a bad story, but I didn't like it. By the way, wasn't there a another short story from the same period about an impossible crime on the London Eye?

So, not the strongest of randomly picked stories from the "Locked and Loaded" franchise, but a fairly decent line-up. Robinson's “The Vanished Billionaire” was a dud. Palmer's "The Monkey Murder" is fun, but, even with the twist in the tail, a minor locked room piece. I greatly enjoyed Pronzini's "The Methodical Cop" and was firmly on Tim Corcoran's side, but pretty minor stuff with a better false-solution than correct answer. And, again, Crider's "See What the Boys in the Locked Room Will Have" is a fun short story, but not to be recommended for its locked room plot. Hudgins' "Murder on the London Eye" has a good setting and nothing more than that. Cobb's "Over the Edge" looms largely over them as the best of the lot.

Window of Opportunity: "The Riddle of the Brass Band" (1934) by Stuart Palmer

Back in November, I reread Stuart Palmer's "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (1935), collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), which is part of the early period of his short stories that "tend to draw on the technique of the impossible crime" – some being out and out impossible crime and locked room stories. "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" is a shining example of Palmer's earlier, plot-oriented short stories with an impossible stabbing at the Chicago Planetarium.

Strangely enough, these earlier short stories are not listed in either Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) or Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019). I even shamefully forgot all about them when cobbling together "The Updated List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." So, prompted by a recent reviews, I decided to take another look at one of these overlooked short stories that I remember liking the first time around.

Palmer's "The Riddle of the Brass Band," originally published in the March, 1934, issue of Mystery, which has a great double premise. Before the story's opens, Inspector Oscar Piper attended a Gridiron Club dinner and had listened to a talk from some amateur criminologist, Leverer, who asserted "that the perfect crime is a murder wherein the murderer is never suspected" and "where the police never bother to investigate" – as "the whole thing passes off as an accident." Leverer went on to state that, if he wanted to kill anybody, "he'd wait until he was alone with them, call their attention to something in the street below, and then up with their ankles." Inspector Piper went home that night "boiling in sulphurous silence." Miss Hildegarde Withers promises to help Piper show him up by investigating the next so-called accident of the kind that comes across his desk.

Well, the story opened on St. Patrick's Day with the police parade passing Thirty-first Street, on Fifth Avenue, the figure of a man came "hurtling down out of the sky" and struck the sidewalk. The victim turns out to be the founder of a new, struggling publishing house, Thomas E. Wright, who had apparently gone to the window of his top floor office to listen to the band, got dizzy and fell out. Wright was alone in the office with the door locked on the inside and his secretary with several disgruntled authors waiting outside in the reception room.

Miss Hildegarde Withers is the first to worm her way to the top floor office of The Lehigh Press before the news reaches them that Wright has plunged to his death. She poses as Wright's aunt from Boston and continues the act to poke around for clues and motives, which she uncovers in spades when attending a literary tea to introduce the Lehigh Press authors to the critics and the press. Miss Withers suggests to the various persons who were present at the office if they want to contribute to a memorial edition of Wright's poetry. She quickly learns Wright was not exactly an honest publisher ("...after he got the money he went ahead and ordered them bound in cheap linoleum"), boss ("...borrowed my salary checks back from me as soon as I got them...") and friend ("...smacked a judgment against my bank account"). So more than enough motives to go around, but the key here is method and opportunity.

The method is, of course, the locked room-trick. A nicely-done and clever variation on the defenestration from a sealed room or inaccessible and watched high spot like a rooftop or balcony. Yes, my recent rereading of Baynard Kendrick's The Whistling Hangman (1937) is what prompted this second read of Palmer's "The Riddle of the Brass Band" as both appeared to have been intrigued by the possibilities this particular impossible crime technique has to offer (see ROT13 comments on my review of "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights"). Palmer returned to that well more than once and, as a result, you can link most of his impossible crime fiction together with all the variations on this method and there certainly is a resemblance to the tricks employed in other stories – which is where opportunity comes into play. Palmer created a neat little situation maddening enough "to make anyone kill." And that situation happened to present one of the characters with an opportunity to pull off the perfect murder. Not an unconvincing window of opportunity either. Only smudge on this otherwise excellent detective story is the perfunctory clueing.

Palmer played the game fair enough as he casually dropped three, hard to miss, clues with the first two clearly identifying the murderer and the third spelling out how it was done. So you can work out what happened to arrive at exactly the same conclusion as Miss Withers, but it feels too easy and somewhat carelessly done. Striking a false-note with the story's fresh premise, a well executed impossible crime idea and Miss Withers being a credit to her fellow amateur sleuths. "The Riddle of the Brass Band" had the potential to be another overlooked gem from Palmer's catalog of short stories, but, in the end, it did not entirely measure up to Palmer's best short stories like "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights." Hardly damaging enough to ruin the whole story. "The Riddle of the Brass Band" is still mostly a very well written, plotted and entertaining Golden Age detective story that might possibly have been even better had some of the story's creativity been redirected towards the clueing. So don't skip it on account of my nitpicking at small details like a petulant fanboy.

Yes, don't worry, there's a two or three non-impossible crime posts coming down the pipeline.

So Great a Distance: "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" (1935) by Stuart Palmer

Last year, Crippen & Landru published a sequel to one of the best collections of "Lost Classics," Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002), which gathered ten, previously uncollected, short stories under a promising title, Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? (2021) – as there are still a dozen stories out there. Buried somewhere in obscure magazines and newspapers. 

Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? collected short stories from the 1950s and '60s period, which clearly showed Palmer tried to adept to the changing times as his short stories put more emphasis on characterization and storytelling. So very different in tone and structure from the shimmering, intricately-plotted 1930s short stories collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles. There were some excellent stories in that last collection, "Where Angels Fear to Tread" (1951), "You Bet Your Life" (1957) and "Who is Sylvia?" (1961), but Palmer's thirties short stories stand among the finest pieces of American detective fiction written during the genre's golden years. Why do those 1930s stories persist in being so thoroughly forgotten or overlooked?

Mike Grost, of A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, writes on his website how Palmer's earlier short stories "tend to draw on the technique of the impossible crime" or "use plot ideas reminiscent of the impossible crime to give an alibi to a single character," while others are "out and out impossible crime tales." More than one can rightly be called gems. Curiously, none of Palmer's 1930s impossible crime stories are listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) nor even "The Updated List of My Favorite Tales of Locked Room Murders & Impossible Crimes." Yeah, I forgot about them too. So time for a refresher and decided to revisit one of my favorite stories from Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles.

Palmer's "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights," originally published in the January, 1935, issue of Mystery, takes place in the Windy City during a cold, blowy Chicago December – where the planetarium becomes the scene of a chance encounter. Tony Lassiter and Avis Le Glare are strangers who find themselves stranded between trains to New York on the icy steps of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomical Museum. So they decide to "be bored together" and plunk themselves down in the middle of the fourth row, of the big planetarium room, to watch the magic and mystery of the sky as the entire firmament of heaven sprang forth upon the domed ceiling. Tony noticed Avis was leaning against him and put his arm around her ("what else was darkness and starlight for?"), but her head "rolled limply and horribly on his shoulder." Something "warm and sticky ebbing from the back of her neck." She had been stabbed with one half of a pair of scissors, which was found beneath a row of seats in the front of the hall.

So the police arrest Tony on the spot as "nobody could have stabbed her without climbing over the feet of the nice old ladies in the row behind them" unless "the killer wore wings or had arms ten feet long." Why would he kill a woman he known for less than an hour or two?

Fortunately, Miss Hildegarde Withers happened to be in Chicago and receives a telegram from Inspector Oscar Piper, in New York City, to investigate the murder at the Chicago planetarium ("PARENTS AUTHORIZE ANY EXPENSE"). Miss Withers presents herself to the District Attorney with a silver badge ("purely honorary") and is allowed to provide some unofficial assistance, but D.A. sees very little hope as the case appears to be "open and shut." But what about the scattered clues? The murder weapon and victim's handbag were discovered in different places around the planetarium. What happened to the second scissor blade? Miss Withers is presented with four witnesses, or rather suspects, who were questioned and searched without result. It takes more work than usually in a short story, before Miss Withers can exclaim, "eureka," but evidence is lacking. Miss Withers sets a trap for the murderer with herself, "a meddling busybody," as bait. 

Palmer's "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" is an excellent, multi-layered and fairly clued detective story with not only a neatly posed, and solved, impossible murder, but a "hidden object" (murder weapon) subplot – a type of side-puzzle often figuring in his detective fiction. Whereas the '50s and '60s Miss Withers' stories prioritized characterization and motivation, "The Riddle of the Whirling Lights" focuses on the how first, the who second and the why comes last. The answers to the first two were great and the solution to the impossible stabbing interesting as it's another variation on a method, or idea, Palmer apparently favored. Namely (SPOILER/ROT13) oevqtvat n tnc orgjrra zheqrere naq ivpgvz. Cnyzre cerfragrq fvzvyne ceboyrzf va “Gur Evqqyr bs gur Oenff Onaq,” Gur Chmmyr bs gur Crccre Gerr naq Gur Chmmyr bs gur Oyhr Onaqrevyyn, juvpu nyy unir qvssrerag fbyhgvbaf jbexvat ba fvzvyne vqrnf. Rira zber vagrerfgvat, Cnyzre nccrnef gb unir funerq gurfr vzcbffvoyr pevzr vqrnf jvgu Xryyrl Ebbf (p.s. Fnvybe, Gnxr Jneavat!). But what a finely-crafted how-was-it-done with a marvelous and original setting, which certainly helped enhanced the overall quality of story even further. Highly recommended! 

A note for the curious: a quick search showed I mentioned “The Riddle of the Whirling Lights” twice before in my reviews of Moray Dalton's The Art School Murders (1943) and John Russell Fearn's One Remained Seated (1946). So it's really embarrassing I blanked on it when compiling the updated list of favorite locked room mysteries. I'm still not going to update that monstrosity until at least 2026.

Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? (2021) by Stuart Palmer

Stuart Palmer was a Hollywood screenwriter, mystery novelist and former president of the Mystery Writers of America who created one of the best, most convincing spinster sleuths in the game, Miss Hildegarde Withers – a New York schoolteacher and "self-appointed gadfly to the homicide division." Miss Withers appeared in fourteen novel-length mysteries and around fifty short stories. A portion of the short stories were collected over the decades in The Riddles of Hildegarde Withers (1947), The Monkey Murders (1950) and a collection of crossover stories, People vs. Withers and Malone (1963), co-created with Craig Rice. That left about half of the stories unaccounted for and it would take nearly forty years, before Crippen & Landru published Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (2002). One of the best collection of short stories from their "Lost Classic" series!

Two decades later, Crippen & Landru published a sequel to that classic collection, entitled Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? (2021), which comes with an introduction by historical mystery writer, Steven Saylor.

Saylor writes Douglas Greene, Jeffrey Marks and Tony Medawar tracked down ten more, previously uncollected, Miss Withers stories in addition to a Howie Rook story, two Sherlock Holmes pastiches and a tale of the supernatural. More importantly, the introduction tells Palmer claimed in 1952 "he had written about 50 Withers stories at that point" and, if his math is correct, that leaves over a dozen stories "buried and waiting to be discovered in miscellaneous American (or Australian?) newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s." So another collection is not off the table, which is why this volume should have been titled Hildegarde Withers: Uncovered Riddles and that hypothetical, last collection should be Hildegarde Withers: Concluding Riddles. And with that out of the way, let's dive into these stories. 

"The Riddle of the Black Spade" was originally published in the October, 1934, issue of Mystery and begins with Miss Withers, "uninvited and unannounced," barging in on Inspector Oscar Piper at the New York Homicide Bureau with a newspaper in hand – carrying a report of a freak accident on a golf course. A former state senator and attorney, David E. Farling, had been discovered lying face down near one of the water hazards of the course. Apparently, Farling had been accidentally struck by a golf ball, killing him instantly, but Miss Withers correctly smells a murder as such accidents never end with a body. She has gets a good reason to stick her nose in the case when the victim's son, Ronald, is arrested on suspicion of murder. Ronald not only had a blazing row with his father, but a skilled golfer who can take "what they call a mashie and chipping balls twenty feet into a tin pail." Miss Withers has her own ideas about the case.

This is a somewhat uneven story that leaves me undecided whether it's too short or too long. Firstly, the story mentioned that whatever killed Farling "would have to be traveling with the speed of a bullet to make such a wound," which makes Miss Withers' solution sound wholly unconvincing. There's no way that was done with the force of a speeding bullet to a skull of "normal thickness." Secondly, there's a very cleverly contrived attempted murder towards the end linked to an early incident in the story and would have made for an excellent short story or an additional plot-thread in a novel-length mystery. So a pretty decent detective story that could have been better had it been either whittled down a little or fully expanded upon. 

"To Die in the Dark" was culled from the pages of the November 18, 1944, issue of The Australian Women's Weekly and brings Inspector Piper to "a run-down, respectable street of brownstones" where he expects to investigate a conventional kind of murder. But what he finds is "another of those locked room things." Charles Portland, a rare book dealer, had been shot to death in his bedroom, but the door was locked on the inside and "the only known key was found in the pocket of the victim's dressing-gown." There's no trace of the gun to be found in the locked room except for a shell case on the floor and the slug that had flattened itself against a wall. What truly astonishes Piper is finding Miss Withers in the house on an assignment and now she has to explain the impossible to exonerate two innocent people. Palmer hardly breaks any new ground here and, normally, I detest this sort of detective story and solution to a locked room puzzle (ROT13: fhvpvqr qvfthvfrq nf zheqre), but it was cast in a somewhat acceptable form. The problem of the absentee gun, in particular, punched up the overall quality of the story. A middling effort from a writer who can do so much better. 

"Where Angels Fear to Tread" was originally published in the February, 1951, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and stands out as the story has Miss Withers "acting like a mother-hen instead of a bloodhound." Miss Withers travels to San Diego, California, to visit a recently married niece and her husband, Joanie and Neil Samson, but finds their honeymoon cottage locked up and abandoned. A neighbor tells Miss Withers "the folks who lived here broke up a week ago" and Joanie appears to have "walked out in what she had on her back," but the bedraggled living room, smashed radio and stained carpet makes her suspect the worst – hitting closer to home than her "impersonal kibitzing on police homicide investigations in the past." This involved her own Joanie! Detective-lieutenant Villalobos is not as accustomed to the schoolteacher's meddling and Inspector Piper has to intervene over the telephone to keep her out of prison ("that New York inspector says you're just a meddlesome old battleaxe of an amateur detective..."). The story then shifts to a shady radio host, Dr. Doan, who has a marriage counseling show complete with dramatic reenactments and a pay-to-play scheme ("...just enclose a five-dollar bill to insure a number-one priority"). Dr. Doan ceremoniously dismisses his small, but loyal, staff to trade his radio career for a television show.

When these two plot-threads begin to come together, Miss Withers has to deduce who out of a handful of people killed Dr. Doan. I strongly suspected the murderer and spotted the big clue, but struggled to explain what the clue actually meant or how it interpret it. And the answers to that question was as surprising and logical as it was satisfying. I don't feel especially bright right now for not catching on to the meaning of that (ROT13) nofheq ubccvat qnapr naq zbnaf bs, “Bu-bu-bu.” Abg gb zragvba gur pyhr bs gur bcra-gbrq fubrf. Well played, Palmer. Well played. The first great story of the collection. 

"The Jinx Man" was first published in the December, 1952, issue of EQMM and concerns "Fortune's fair-haired boy," Roscoe Brock, whose luck has began to run a little thin. A stray bullet pierced his hat while horse riding. A spoiled bottle of cognac turned out to have been poisoned. And when Brock went down to the subway to shelter from a thunderstorm, he was pushed off the platform in front of a train. The train stopped mere inches from where Brock was sprawled. Inspector Piper tells Miss Withers "real murderers don't fool around with fake accidents that misfire," but tend to come right to the point and usually it's "the point of a knife or pistol." So gives Miss Withers his consent to play sleuth, but the near death escapes continue. Miss Withers is even present when Brock opens a package containing a coral snake. Inevitably, one of the attempts results in a victim, but probably not the intended victim. Or was it?

Miss Withers remarks that the case is like "skim milk masquerades as cream" and "murder is a two-edged sword, not to be fooled with." She was right. I think most seasoned armchair detectives can anticipate most of the plot developments, but the ending springs a genuine surprise with a bitter twist on the reader. A minor, but very well done short story that ended stronger than expected. 

"Hildegarde and the Spanish Cavalier" was first published in December, 1955, issue of EQMM and is the reason why this review is tagged with the "Courtroom Drama" label, because the story earned it on every front! This story has everything. Courtroom drama, courtroom shenanigans and courtroom wizardry to the point where Perry Mason probably considered suing Miss Withers for gimmick infringement. Juan del Puerto, also known as the Spanish cavalier, has been under suspicion of having killed his wife and "somehow disposed of the body on the honeymoon cruise," but the only thing the police could pin on him was a bigamy charge. Having served a five-year sentence, Del Puerto is about to be released and he has retained lawyer to claim his wife's life saving. A sum of thirty thousand dollars which he was wearing in a money-belt when arrested as Del Puerto claims it was a gift to him from before they got married.

Miss Withers plans to detonate a bombshell during the court hearing in order to crack the case, but a newspaper headline and a gunshot in court throws the whole case in disarray. And places an entirely different complexion on the case. This story has better storytelling than plotting as it's not difficult to see which the direction the solution is headed towards, but a thoroughly entertaining story nonetheless. And poor Piper! After reading the headlines berating the police for their failure, he laments that has "spent thirty-five years as a cop, and nothing to show for it but a couple of months' pay in the bank and a stake in the retirement fund. I've personally helped send over a hundred murderers to the Chair, and stayed up all night drinking black coffee and hating myself the eve of their executions. I've been beaten up by thugs, I've had gangster lead pried out of my carcass twice, I've worked twenty-four hours a day for days on end when a big case came up, and all the thanks I now get for it is a tabloid's editorial."

"You Bet Your Life" originally appeared in the May, 1957, issue of EQMM and is the unexpected highlight of the collection as it's more of a suspense thriller than detective story. The story opens with Miss Withers making her television debut on Groucho Marx's real-life 1950s TV show, You Bet Your Life. Miss Withers tells Groucho her avocation is criminology ("face cream or dairy cream?") and she's currently working on a solution to the Walter McWalters case. A socialite and conman who "walked off some months ago with a suitcase full of somebody else's money," $200,000 in total, but McWalters pulled "a disappearing act more famous than anything since Judge Crater's" and Miss Withers claims to have succeeded where "the biggest police manhunt in recent history has failed" – even knowing his approximate whereabouts. This is, of course, all part of a ruse to draw McWalters out of hiding, but Inspector Piper was horrified at the broadcast. Miss Withers assumed McWalters is nothing more than an ordinary, non-violent conman, but Pipers knows he's a regular Bluebeard who's "wanted in several states on suspicion of murder." So now her prying has gotten her in the cross hairs of a very real and dangerous lady killer. You can almost read it like a siege story with the question not so much being as how and who McWalters is going to be revealed, but how Miss Withers is going to survive this ordeal. Since her only protection is "a silly French poodle who loves everybody in the world" and "a squirt gun." A surprisingly great story considering it's a suspense thriller rather than a proper whodunit. 

"Who is Sylvia?" was first published in the July, 1961, issue of EQMM and, as you gathered from the previous few stories, Palmer began to put more emphasis on character and storytelling during the mid-1950s. This story is a fine example of Palmer playing around with characters and identity to tell an entertaining yarn. Miss Withers is asked by a former pupil who has fallen in love with a young, aspiring actress, Sally Burris, who headed to the city in a stagestruck daze and simply vanished. Now both Miss Withers and her ex-pupil worry something dreadful has happened. So she asks Inspector Piper for help and has some unexpected news. A wealthy socialite, Mrs. Lola Mills, who's convinced her son has married "a reasonably accurate facsimile" of Miss Lizzie Borden. The woman in question is an oddball who lapses into a British or Australian accent and has "a big leather bag that she keeps locked in a closet and guards with her life" named Sylvia Burris! Mrs. Mills want her "daughter-in-law arrested and deported so that the wedding can be quietly annulled," which puts tension on the family. And pretty soon evidence emerges that someone is thinking about murder.

Miss Withers is "a firm believer in preventive detection" and has to figure out what, exactly, is going on and why, before someone decides to pull the trigger. Yet another unexpectedly great tale as it's not your typical detective story. 

"The Return of Hildegarde Withers" (1964) is the next story in the collection, but I'm going to skip it as the story is a very light rewrite of "The Riddle of the Forty Costumes," which had also been collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles. While reading, I began to experience a mild case of déjà vu and a quick search turned up the title "The Riddle of the Forty Costumes" and a comparison of the two confirmed my suspicion. All you need to know it's the dullest story in the collection in which Miss Withers investigates the disappearance of a dance teacher. 

"Hildegarde Withers is Back" was originally published in the April, 1968, issue of EQMM and is a return to form for both Palmer and Miss Withers. Miss Withers has retired and settled down in California, but returned to New York City to come to the aid of her old friend, Inspector Piper, on the Barth case. Cecily Barth was "one of Hollywood's most famous stars in her day," known as the Love Goddess of the Silver Screen, who has life story told as TV special. The producer, Boris Abbas, brought a Hollywood scriptwriter, Gary Twill, to New York and they picked a "young sexpot actresses to play," Lilith Lawrence, "the leading role." However, the producer disliked the script, fired the writer and Twill proceeded to do, as Piper described it, "the Dutch Act out of his hotel window" ("I do wish, Oscar, you would stop insulting the people of Holland"). The police believes it was a simple case of suicide, but Miss Withers is willing the wager a pretty penny the scriptwriter was cleverly murdered. Throughout the story, you can't help but cast a suspicious eye in the direction of the murderer, but the crux of the plot is how it could have been done. Oh, boy, did I sink my teeth into a red herring and stubbornly refused to let it go.

A very peculiar item that figured in a previous story is casually mentioned here and this peculiar item can do something that could have explained how it was done, because the impact of the fall would have obliterated evidence of its use on the body – especially if it was a head-on collision with the pavement. It was simple, elegant and completely wrong. Palmer came up with a better, much more satisfying explanation. A great throwback to the puzzle-driven stories from the 1930s and '40s. 

"Hildegarde Plays It Calm" was first published in the April, 1969, issue of EQMM and gives Miss Withers a new experience as an amateur detective. Many years ago, Miss Withers solved "the famous toe-print case" that placed Eileen Travis in the death house on two counts of Homicide One, but her sentence was commuted and served only ten years. Now she's on the outside, Eileen turns to Miss Withers to ask advice on behalf of a friend who's still on the inside. A friend, named Bunny, whose husband has stopped coming up to see her or even write anymore. Since this is the first time Miss Withers has "a chance at firsthand to see what they're like when and if they get back into the world," she decides to help Eileen and take her to see what Bunny's husband is up to. But the evening doesn't exactly go as planned. How or what is something you have to read for yourself, but the story is a fitting capstone to Miss Withers' short story run. A fitting, final case for a schoolteacher who keeps sticking her nose in murder cases! 

The last four stories will be discussed in bulk in order to not bloat this review even further and because the stories were not particularly interesting to me. Firstly, there the only known short story in existence featuring Palmer's secondary series-detective, "The Stripteaser and the Private Eye" (1968), in which Howie Rook comes to the aid of a well-known stripper who may have witnessed a gang killing. So not my type of detective story. "How Lost Was My Father" (1953) is a very well written ghost story that became a rural legend and comes with an introduction to give some cultural and historical context to the story. I really liked it. Just one questions. Why has the premise of a man who "one moment he had walked in the middle of the forty-acre pasture, and the next moment he had vanished," while being watched, never been used for an impossible crime novel? Someone tell Paul Halter to get to work! I expected much more from the Sherlockian pastiche "The Adventure of the Marked Man" (1944), in which Holmes and Dr. Watson try to save a man being pestered by a would-be-assassin, but not one of the Great Detective's most remarkable or memorable cases. On the other hand, I really enjoyed "The Adventure of the Remarkable Worm" (1944), a Holmesian pastiche, which is modeled on an allusion to one of those many untold cases. While a parody, it manages to come with a surprisingly logical and coherent story based on this brief description from "The Problem of Thor Bridge" (1922): "A third case worthy of note is that of Isadora Persano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science." The collections ends with essay/fan letter titled "The I-O-U of Hildegarde Withers" (1948) explaining why there would be no Miss Withers without Sherlock Holmes. A nice touch to round out the collection.

So, as usually is the case with collections of short stories single author, Hildegarde Withers: Final Riddles? is a mixed bag of treats with only one real dud, some decent stories and a few welcome surprises, but, on a whole, not the classic collection that its predecessor was. However, I think the stories collected here suffered from Palmer trying to move along with the times and began to emphasize character-driven storytelling over intricate plotting. Whereas Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles comprised of short stories from the thirties and forties. Although I don't think a slight reduction in the plotting department will diminish any of the fun these stories will bring to long-time fans of Stuart Palmer, Miss Hildegarde Withers, Inspector Oscar Piper and that kindhearted poodle "who would gladly have held the dark-lantern for Jack the Ripper."

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!